Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  “I’ve never even seen a fawn,” Sut On says, though she’s never made this objection to stories about fox-fairies. But they’re no longer on the Rue Catinat now, so she skips on the streets that are increasingly familiar, and her grandfather buys her a slice of pineapple.

  “A deer is a fleet animal,” he says very carefully: it is Sut On who will go to the French school.

  “Draw your own conclusions”

  In French books the paper is very glossy. Touching it, in her European schoolgirl’s smock, Sut On is no longer a girl who comes home each day to a room above a go-down in Cholon, or even a strangely pink-faced girl whose mother in thin, high-heeled shoes plays tennis at the Cercle Sportif and thinks nothing of walking in and out of shops on the Rue Catinat. Instead, she is someone named Françoise or perhaps Solange, whose face she cannot quite imagine, but whose feet take her along broad, tree-lined boulevards, broader than any in Saigon, and down into underground trains where people around her sit down politely with armfuls of long, thin breads. Sometimes this Françoise or Solange takes her small dog, Coco, for a walk into gardens called the Tuileries. She is totally unfamiliar with goats, though sometimes in August she and her family—mustached, firm-voiced father, smiling mother, and perhaps a small brother named Jean-Claude—take trips in a car which they own, past farms to the countryside. Here, there are animals, maybe even a goat, but Françoise or Solange occupies herself with the fruit orchards. She sings a song to herself in a perfect French accent about a shepherdess, all the while she is picking cherries and dropping them one, two, three into a basket. She is very careful to avoid picking any mushrooms, and when it is time for a meal, eats veal in a sauce of wine and butter, and potatoes that have been cut up thin and fried. Never in her life has she tasted bean curd, and if she saw a lichee nut, she wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  “She’ll grow up to be a taxi-girl,” Ping shrieks whenever she sees Sut On in her smock, carrying home her school-books and writing out her lessons. It’s the one thing Ping ever learned from Chinese literature: educated girls may bring great pleasure to men, even emperors, but never, never are they marriageable. Sut On’s mother pays no attention to this, goes on pouring out her many cups of tea as usual, and worries only that her daughter, almost grown now, has become much too concerned with ordinary noises and everyday smells. Because of this, Ping has begun to call her Madame Oo-la-la, and still rails to Wu about his father, “How can he have shown such preference? He must have been as blind and deaf then as he is now.”

  He’s not truly deaf yet, Sut On’s grandfather, but he is blind enough so that it’s very difficult for him to read. Instead of taking walks together, Sut On reads to him from old issues of a Chinese newspaper whose office has been bombed. Luckily he cannot tell that these are articles which he’s heard before, and is pleased enough with Sut On’s blurry presence and the rising and falling of her voice as she reads. After his death, when his picture—taken so far back in his youth that Sut On does not even recognize him—is hanging on the ancestral altar, her mother says, “He was a very fair man, your grandfather. He had no illusions about his children.” What, in Sut On’s opinion, was there to have illusions about?

  There are things about her, though, which he has never known. First, her greatest mistake at the French school: a picture in drawing class. The drawing was in honor of Christmas, a feast day celebrating peacefulness and serene joy. Sut On drew a great-winged bird flying slowly from high mountains to a quiet pond. All around her, other children drew a fat, bearded man, Père Noël, or a pink, yellow-haired baby surrounded by donkeys. The French girls laughed aloud, the Vietnamese girls looked at each other and giggled, the drawing teacher tore up her paper. Sut On looked up at the drawing teacher: blond and doughy, his face looked like a countryside in a European child’s picture book—the sheep on hills in French nursery rhymes. So, once again Sut On drew a picture for the joyful holiday—a pink, yellow-haired baby, and put him right next to a goat.

  “Do you live in Cholon?” the French girls would ask her sometimes. “My parents like to go there to eat Chinese food. Do you walk all the way?”

  Sut On walks all the way, she has never tired of it. No longer a small child on the arm of her grandfather, there are streets in Saigon she has gotten to know as well as Cholon. These days, though, there are almost no French girls left in her classes, and the Vietnamese girls who once giggled at her drawing hop into their brothers’ sports cars, wearing sunglasses and giggling still. This time they’re off to Vung Tau, to the seashore. Perhaps soon they’ll go to Paris or even America. In the meantime they buy new scarves, look through Paris-Match, and watch the American secretaries whose hairdos, incredibly, rise up like so many new buildings: floors and floors of immovable, perfect curls.

  Sut On will not go to Paris, nor to the university at Hue as she had wished. In the room above her uncle’s go-down, cousins’ children lie wailing on the floor, Lim sucks his gums with his cap on, the goat rings his bell in the yard. If she takes this teacup from her mother’s hands, it will not rest between her fingers, but fling itself in all directions: like a dragon or one of the Forty-seven Beasts, there is nothing that it will not smash.

  “A secret base in Cu Chi”

  Narrator: “The village of Quoc Tri, once a place of cheer and hardy, joyous activity, found itself suddenly plunged, through no fault of its own, into one of lassitude and woe. No longer did the sultry winds whistle through the green and gold stalks a happy, continuous melody as busy as the chirping of crickets. It was not floods which were drowning the crops and sturdy spirits of the villagers, but great sheets of fire and flame, falling from the skies, which ruthlessly consumed, sparing nothing: neither fields, nor homes, nor sons. The villagers who remained could not contain their puzzlement. What had they done to so anger their ancestors? The women wept and wailed over the loss of those most dear, and the men, sunk in anger and sorrow, did not know what there was to be done, nor what, indeed, was the cause of this terrible misfortune. As they sat, still tormented by grief and astonishment, soldiers appeared amidst the ruins. From their speech and appearance, the villagers could ascertain that these soldiers were Southerners like themselves, and rushed out to greet them with hope innocent in their hearts. Alas! Neither hope nor innocence lasted beyond that instant. The soldiers, as rude and ruthless as the flames themselves, gave no heed to the cries of their countrymen. Cruelty flickered on their features and they swooped through the desolated village, ravishing its young daughters, torturing its revered Elders and temporary Chief. But still they had not contented themselves, for they began to vie with each other in wringing the necks of the few miserable, squawking chickens scratching mournfully about in the scorched yards. These they carried off to heavy rumbling trucks nearby, trucks whose massive sides were labeled U.S.A. And finally the villagers understood! These soldiers were the puppet troops of a usurper government, and the sheets of flame, the cause of their misfortune, did not fall from the skies, but were thrown upon them by giant planes flown from the country of Hollywood.”

  What has happened to Françoise or Solange? And where, for that matter, is Sut On? Called Anh now, she is wearing black trousers still strange to her, and standing to the side, watching, as a small theatrical troupe performs a pageant for the villagers. It is an NLF holiday, so members from her base, which is close to the village, have come with the troupe to celebrate. It’s not the first time she’s been in a village like this one: years before, when Wu drove out to buy rice, Sut On and Chen occasionally went along. Chen would lope along with his father, but Sut On almost never got out of the car. Sitting in it, stuck to her seat by the heat and the sun, she would look out the windows, closed against mosquitoes, and staring at the red-tiled roofs behind small palm trees, at the little orchards of mangoes and jackfruits, and, above all, at a certain slow quietness so different from Cholon, she would wish that she was one of the small girls she could see running barefoot past the monkeys, sucking on a piece of cane or perha
ps a coconut. She looks no more like them now than she did then: it’s girls like these she’s met at Cu Chi, girls to whose bodies black trousers are not strange, girls who have run barefoot for miles and miles through wild panther country and think nothing of it. Bits of rice and nuoc-mam are what they’re used to, and jungle sounds at night do not make them jump. Their Vietnamese is so quick she can barely understand it. Naturally she is still not trusted.

  The troupe is finishing up, waiting for the musicians. They sing with a guitar:

  An American plane is like a tiger

  Ferocious from afar

  But helpless against determination!

  Sut On is still watching a small-boned girl from the troupe, a dancer, who played out with slow, huddled movements the grief of a widow. The sadness, which just minutes before crept and bent through all of her, is gone now, transformed. She stands up straight and, in a plain cotton blouse her mother might have worn in the Viet Minh, is singing with all of them, “Helpless against determination!”

  “Other women bring forth children, you bring forth rifles,” said the official who arrested Ho’s sister in the days of the Viet Minh. Her father was a lettré. “My grandfather was a lettré,” says Sut On that night, when they are back at Cu Chi, far beneath foliage. In the darkness especially, the feeling of holiday persists: there are coconuts and an orange or two from the village, and some of the younger boys are strumming on guitars. But Sut On is impatient with it. In a headiness, an elation she cannot explain to herself, she pushes a guitar out of someone’s hands, and in her high Chinese voice—she hears her accent but doesn’t care—begins to sing:

  Dors mon amour

  Fais do-do mon trésor

  On crie chez la voisine

  Chez nous une câline

  Tu se traines dans la fange

  Tu vas dans la soie

  Dans la robe d’un ange recalée pour toi.

  The song is from Mother Courage, a record Sut On once found hidden behind books in the French school.

  Dors mon amour

  Fais do-do mon trésor

  L’un repose en Pologne

  Et l’autre je ne sais où.

  “Why are you singing a French song?” says the cadre. He is a wiry man, quick, nimble, and for that reason called Squirrel. No one’s name is his own.

  Why is she singing a French song? For a second, in her headiness, Sut On thinks she will tell Squirrel about Mother Courage, about the Thirty Years’ War, but is afraid that just like with machine-gun fire, when her head drums so quickly that the rounds seem too slow, her thoughts are going so quickly her voice would make no sense.

  “It’s a lullaby,” she says, and, looking at him directly, knows perfectly well that was not the way she sang it.

  The cadre begins tapping rapidly on a bamboo length he has sharpened. In his staccato Northern voice, he says, “You should not stay in the jungle any longer.”

  “A red and a blue scarf

  and two wigs”

  There is no street in Cholon, no house, no door, no stand, no stall that Sut On could not find in her sleep. It is in fact this feeling of sleep that stays with her now as she walks through the market in a short wig and a Western dress, seeing no one and smiling dimly, politely, at hawkers who, noticing a stranger, shout out elevated prices in broken Vietnamese. She could tear off her wig, pull out her voice, and scream and haggle with them in Chinese, but luckily the sleepiness stops her. In some ways, nothing even seems familiar, so she walks on, with her sunglasses, to a certain teashop where she picks up instructions. In front of it there is a row of old women who are selling radios and cameras in cartons marked PX. One of them suddenly looks up at her and in a hoarse, tired voice calls out in Chinese—it is not her mother. Inside, the message is more or less what she has been expecting: “The mountains around you do not have higher peaks than the one on which you already stand. There is no going back.”

  In the bare Cholon apartment rented to Miss Phung Ngoc Anh, Sut On lights a joss stick, and in its old, missed smell folds and unfolds the scarves, staring at the red and blue squares in the dark room. Over and over again she turns them inside out and around and smooths down the edges; it’s as if they were someone else’s, she has never been so neat.

  “Should I wear the red or blue?” she says, and feels like giggling, so much does she want to pretend that this is her dilemma.

  Asleep on the straw mat which belongs to the apartment, she dreams that her grandfather is walking through the long, narrow halls of her uncle’s go-down. He is coming to greet her, but does not call out her name or even beckon to her. He just keeps on walking slowly with a slice of pineapple held out in his hands.

  “There is no going back.” To what would Phung Ngoc Anh go back? There is a girl with a flowing red scarf who speeds through the streets on the back of a motorcycle. If her heart is remote, she’d be the last one to know it. Fleet as a fawn, she shoots with both hands.

  Baby-sitting

  THIS IS ONE OF the places where the Marshaks lived: a small stone cottage, probably whitewashed walls, outside some virgin sand and water the color of tinted sunglasses, maybe a clump or two of bougainvillaea, and, as far as you might want to see, several endless fields of blinding red anemones.

  Theodore H. Marshak, America’s enigmatic wanderer-poet-playwright, interviewed for the BBC’s prestigious Third Programme, was asked if there was anything about the U.S. which he missed. Confounding both interviewer and audience, Marshak replied, “Yes. Egg-rolls and spareribs.” Abroad at the time was celebrated N.Y. restaurateur Sy Krinsky, and hearing of Marshak’s response, the sympathetic Krinsky immediately arranged for special Care packages from his Jade and Lotus Garden to be flown to Marshak at his isolated Mediterranean retreat

  And:

  Topics and Treasures alight on … exciting young Ted (Knives) Marshak and his radiant-as-her-name wife, Sunny. No believers in private Illyrias they, but as Ted told us, thoughtfully choosing his words with the quiet, dramatic intensity for which he is treasured, “This is a good place. It lets you know that life is where you are.”

  Where I was at the time was in high school, and one of the things that preoccupied me in those days was the way people looked. Going to school in the morning, walking up the difficult blocks which were all hills, I used to imagine that just up above us was an overworked pilot in a low-flying plane. Any time he needed a jolt out of his boredom, he just glanced down from the cockpit and took a good look at us: long hair, dangling earrings, Mexican serapes, and chunky leather sandals that kept winding up our legs as if they were the hills. Those were the girls.

  The boys, already sensitive to charges of “fruitiness,” were careful to look as if they might have been going anywhere, and could only be spotted by the instrument cases or sketchbooks they carried between their looseleafs. Here and there, in advertisement of something particular, some had longer hair and wore capes.

  As we came closer to the tops of the hills, the sounds of instruments tuning up surrounded us. Finally, at the very top was the school itself, famous all over the city for its distinctiveness and nonconformity. An occasional flute or bassoon blew itself over the first warning bell, and certain above all of our distinctiveness, we pulled at our serapes and streamed in through the opened doors.

  I say “we”: in fact I did not have long hair or Greek sandals, and took very little part in the life of the school, which I called to myself decadent, affected, and sometimes bourgeois, though this word “bourgeois” was known to be out of date, a carry-over from other times. Still, these were my favorite words, and were in my eyes constantly as I climbed up the hill or walked through the halls. Because I did not share in the look of the school and seemed over-quiet in the recklessness which was its spirit, there were people who began to wonder.

  “Are your parents divorced?” the guidance counselor asked me. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  “No,” I said, and was easily truthful.

  “Just
tell them you’re a mental case, it’s the one thing they’re always waiting for,” said a girl I knew whose father was a well-known sculptor, and who was herself to become briefly famous in her senior year when she refused to take cover in a shelter drill outside Altman’s.

  “I can’t,” I said. It was one of the many things I considered decadent.

  Partly out of concession, and partly because I liked them, I did get long pierced earrings, and sometimes wore peasant blouses. About these heavily embroidered peasant blouses, my mother said, “Every Polish peasant had a blouse like that. Wanda the goose-girl!” And for the earrings she fell back on Yiddish, calling out as I left the house, “The little gypsy with her jangles.”

  In my jangles, and with my schoolbooks, I sat opposite the guidance counselor.

  “Your teachers say that you don’t contribute in classes. Would you say that you were always shy?”

  “With some people,” I said, and looked out for life beyond the shades where a whole city was speeding about its morning business.

  She leaned back against her filing cabinets and smiled at me as if I were a convalescent. “There’s a wonderful church downtown, and they’ve asked us if we could find them an organist.”

  “I don’t play the organ,” I said, and ran out with the bell to report on this latest bit of decadence to my friend Simone.

  Simone and I were not exactly friends. We belonged to rival Socialist-Zionist youth groups, and in city-wide gatherings of Zionist youth stood glaring at each other in blouses of varying shades of blue, each washed-out difference in color marking our separate commitments.

  “What about the Arab workers who were paid money wages and never included communally?” Simone would say. She wore her hair pulled back by a thin, knotted rubber band that nobody would dare call Beat or bohemian, and would not have her ears pierced or even wear olivewood barrettes. Also, she had a policy of never taking a seat in a bus or subway, because if there was an empty seat near a Negro and you didn’t sit in that one, it could be judged as offensive, and if you did, when there were other seats around, it could easily be thought of as patronizing.