by Lan Cao
I take a deep breath, then another and another. I believe that by sealing myself in silence, my other senses have grown sharper. I am developing an ability to see through walls, unearth others’ lives of subterfuge, remove the thick cloaks they use to conceal. A tortuous warren of electrical wires and pipes lies behind drywall. Insects are burrowing through the foundation of our house, centipedes, termites, ants, beetles. Our mother will soon swallow her pill. I want to walk to her room and offer her a moment’s kindness. But I cannot and the desire passes away soon enough. The more I am able to discern, the more I want to flee. Next door, night after night, our mother’s grief works its way deeper inside her bones and sinews. Grief engulfs her very spirit.
I nurse my yearning for something else. James. I can still see his finger on top of her wound. And James was the one who cried that evening. I have never seen a man weep so extravagantly. But I cannot bear to be near such an outpouring of grief. An echo chamber of turmoil. I have become used to our father’s porcelain gaze, our mother’s discreet sorrow, the implosion of melancholy within. And what once seemed an everlasting connection—my sister, me, and James, three unabashed points always together, like sun, earth, and moon—has been broken.
James tries to stay in touch with me. But Father makes it is easy for me to rebuff him. In one of the few moments after my sister’s death when he seems to be aware of me, and not simply of his perfunctory fatherly duties, he has forbidden me to go anywhere near the military police compound. He holds me tightly and shakes a finger for emphasis. His warnings give me maneuvering space to avoid James. There is gravity to his instruction and I know our Chinese grandmother will strictly enforce it. Now on those rare occasions when my Chinese grandmother and I take our evening walk, we turn left from the front gate, not right. Right is where it happened.
One day we pass by our corner eatery. Standing under the wide shade of our tamarind trees, young men flick cigarettes, tap their feet to the raucous beat of bass drums. James is squatting on a low footstool. In his hand is a bottle of “33” beer.
I see James take a big swig, then his eyes catch mine. We are face-to-face. I cannot pretend I do not see him. Our Chinese grandmother nudges me toward him. James comes upon me, kneels down, and holds me close inside the clasp of big, muscled arms, crushing my face against his chest. Once again his tears flow without reserve. I wince. It seems that the next appropriate thing to happen would be for me to say something to him. But I remain in the endless snarl of my own silence. Our Chinese grandmother tries to communicate with James. I watch the hand signals. She is trying to tell him I no longer talk.
I am aware that my face has the plain, gray look of a stone statue. I watch the unfolding of their intricate pantomime.
Really? James struggles to express himself in Vietnamese. Really? He points to his mouth, then shakes his head.
As he moves, the sleeve on his white cotton shirt is lifted. I am shocked but touched. He has a new tattoo—it is the date of my sister’s death, etched on his arm in cobalt blue.
Our Chinese grandmother nods, points to her own mouth, points at me, and then shakes her head. James grows somber. He crouches down, leveling his eyes with mine, and hugs me. I put my hand on his back and feel the tight little knots I once touched with my heels and toes. He offers his finger for me to hook, but although I want to, I freeze. James smiles reassuringly. “You will be okay. I’ll be back.”
When we come home, my cricket is waiting for me in the amniotic silence of my bedroom. I put the cricket on my hand and together we take a walk in the garden. Leaves rustle above as sparrows flit from a cluster of star fruit trees. Nearby, the mango tree I used to hide behind stands still and erect. Green mangoes hang low among the red glossy leaves, drooping from the stems. Unripe and tart, they can be dipped in chili powder, sugar, and salt, a delicious combination of sweet, sour, and hot in the mouth. I can almost taste the tanginess against my tongue. The night hums with nocturnal creatures. In response, my cricket makes its own little chirps. I put a finger to my lips and shush its shrill little calls.
I ask the cricket if it wants to stay outside tonight. I keep my palm open to allow it to jump off, but it clings to my skin, opting to suffer life’s shortcomings with me instead. Above us the stars gleam. I imagine one blinking at me. Here on earth the cricket and I will hide out together in friendship. I will have the cricket by me while I wait for life to make its turns.
• • •
Later, as I lie in bed, the moon peeks through my window, shedding a soft ivory light into the room. This is the time of night when funny things unspool for me and I can feel the stirring of their dark, ridged edges. I close my eyes, turn my face. I can feel them move through my body, clots of memories that dislodge, then liquefy. Perhaps the darkness serves as an anticoagulant. Things unclot and bleed at night, dissolve and reveal their true form. Perhaps time moves differently at night, not across the face of a clock, in seconds, minutes, and hours, but through a reticulated space of loops and curls, dips and lunges, that spiral endlessly inward.
My compass remains what it has always been. We all have one, that one singular person for whom love is freely given no matter the circumstances. There again, even now, is the unmistakable feeling of my sister’s touch, our bedtime ritual. It lingers.
Sometimes the feeling that there is some other person standing next to me is so strong I have to turn and look. It is as if the person were hovering in my blind spot. Walking beside me.
And then it occurs to me. She is my first love. Her loss is the one I will never fully recover from. When she died she left me forever full of yearning.
8
Emerald Green Eyes
MR. MINH, 2006, 1967
There was an American with green eyes the color of irrigated rice fields.
He came in 1963, but I did not meet him until 1966, at a training center as I entered my last week of a special command course. His name was John Clifford. He was one of several American advisers who gave us lessons in personnel management, patrol and ambush, night operations, marksmanship, small unit actions, intelligence, security, logistics. We were practicing bayonet thrusts and reviewing the mechanical workings of weapons, the simple logic of American firepower. A few of us were handed the prized M16.
He told us to watch animals for clues on how to search for food, water, and shelter in a survival situation. He asked us to call him Cliff. He was in our country not for a one-year tour of duty but to pursue more long-term strategic goals, the details of which were not shared with us. He was not young, as the American boys usually were. He had fought in Italy and Germany all through World War II. Years of combat had carved themselves into his rough-hewn face. I looked into his eyes and liked what they imparted—a full, piercing, rice-field-green presence. When we talked, I could feel the weight of his gaze on my face. I wasn’t accustomed to such forthrightness.
He did not act like someone cast adrift in our country. His posture, his countenance, his eyes—nothing suggested calibration, restraint, or reserve. He was willing to be befriended. He ate our fruits—mangosteens, papayas, longans—though he insisted that they be tree-ripened. I watched as he skinned the hard rind of a longan with his teeth. He was equally game to try street food. He would eat a full bowl of pho for breakfast down to the last leisurely slurp and the last broken noodle that could be picked up with a pair of chopsticks. He would devour a heaping plate of raw green papaya salad with reckless enthusiasm.
The Americans had built a constellation of base camps around the country. Ours was located at the edge of Saigon. There we reviewed the ways of survival, honing method into instinct. The ability to fabricate something from whatever was available depended on the ability to watch the world with eyes that could see everything and miss nothing. The fact that a bee or an ant went into a hole in a tree might mean that the hole contained water. In this drifting landscape of jungle greens and moving shadows, we learned to mak
e use of every camouflaged object, every part of the earth.
Cliff’s willingness to listen distinguished him from the other American advisers and endeared him to me immediately. He and I were lunching together when news of yet another upheaval was announced. A car filled with explosives had blown up in the parking lot of a popular hotel. The explosion killed and injured more than a hundred U.S. and Vietnamese nationals. I looked at his face, tanned to a reddish brown by our sun. I could see he was trying to suppress his own emotions and gave me a consolatory glance.
“Dong Ha, Con Thien, Gio Linh have been attacked all within a short span of time. It’s as if they’ve lined up all these towns and proceeded to knock them down. . . . You are too busy fighting among yourselves to fight the enemy.” He reached across the table and gave my hand a ferocious squeeze, as if to get my attention.
“I know, Cliff. The North has become very bold. I think they will go after the Central Highlands next.”
“To cut the South in half,” Cliff agreed.
“It’s a shame we are such idiots,” I said. I felt the need to apologize for our absurdities. “To be fair, we’re also in a difficult spot.”
We were a country defined by a long history of repelling foreign invasions. Our heroes were the Trung Sisters, Ngo Quyen, Tran Hung Dao—patriots who fought the Chinese. “You’re part of the problem too, unfortunately,” I said to Cliff. “The North has managed to use your very presence for propaganda purposes.”
Cliff nodded and gave me a drawn-out “hmm” that signified less agreement than curiosity.
So I told him about a popular Vietnamese proverb. “Cong ran can ga nha,” I said, pronouncing each word slowly. “It means carrying a snake on your back, bringing it back home, and allowing it to kill your homegrown chickens.”
“I gather we’re the snake.” Cliff chuckled sportingly.
“It’s an accusation that the North is lobbing quite successfully.”
Cliff ordered another beer. “This is good,” he said, reading the label. “Thirty-three. Stronger than it looks.”
“Rice lager,” I said.
“I get it. They’ve managed to play up the nationalism angle and present themselves as the true nationalists,” Cliff said with quiet authority. “By associating with us, you’re now the illegitimate collaborators.” His face turned sweaty and red. I suggested looking for shade but he wanted to stay and continue the conversation.
“From day one, we knew this would be an issue. President Diem struggled with it,” I explained. “He needed American aid but wasn’t sure about paying the price of an American presence in our country. He and his brother Nhu even contacted, secretly of course, the highest leadership in Hanoi to work out a negotiated settlement that would bypass the Americans and cut short American involvement in our country.”
“I didn’t know that,” Cliff said. As a military man, he was not naturally inclined toward the clotted, underground world of political intrigue.
Quietly, I wondered if the maneuver was meant to bring about a negotiated peace and unification or was simply a means for his brother, the controversial Mr. Nhu, to thumb his nose at the Americans, to wriggle from the grip of American pressure for reform.
“Have you heard of Mieczyslaw Maneli?” I asked.
Cliff shook his head slowly, his head lolled back as if to retrieve a memory. “I don’t think so.” He had his elbow on the table, supporting his chin with his hand.
In case I was mispronouncing his name, I wrote it on a napkin and showed it to Cliff. He shook his head and repeated, “I don’t know him.” I looked at my watch and ordered a fresh round of squid. “Maneli was the Polish middleman between Saigon and Hanoi. Neither we nor they wanted our secret dealings known.”
“Why not exactly?”
“Russia and China would not want a negotiated settlement. They don’t want Vietnam to be sovereign or neutral. So they aren’t in favor of compromise or a negotiated peace. What they want is a Vietnam firmly within the Communist camp.”
“And the American position was what?” Cliff asked.
“Who knows? Do the Americans even know?”
Cliff laughed. “Well put, well put,” he said.
“The American position is probably to keep us within the American orbit. And dependent. In any event, President Diem didn’t trust the American position, whatever it might have been. So he kept the Maneli affair secret from the Americans as well.”
I had Cliff’s continuing attention. “If you know our history, and the Chinese and Soviets certainly do, you would see that it’s in their interest to keep you in this war. So they can trumpet your presence. They want you stuck here while they remain offstage, calling the shots.”
Cliff closed his eyes as if to give the matter serious mental consideration. “I can see how complicated everything is,” he said in his customary, level voice.
“Exactly. A war has to be seen from so many angles,” I said, surprised that I was mouthing what was essentially Phong’s stock position. This included the American domestic scene, which few Vietnamese considered or understood. Indeed, my doubts about American commitment to overseas battles in the far-flung corners of the world were confirmed years ago when I was first sent, along with a handful of other Vietnamese, to an American officers’ training school at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. We landed, and right away we let out a soft, collective sigh. Ahhh. So this is America, we thought. A country the size of a continent. Beautiful. Free. So rich, so vast, and so startlingly separate from the rest of the world, loosed from the teeming continents of poverty far away. A country like that could afford to be unruffled and detached—oblivious to miseries beyond its borders.
Every week Cliff and I would lunch together at Saigon’s family-owned eateries. We were a country preoccupied with food. Practically every house doubled as a storefront designed to satisfy our culinary cravings, from the most delicately wrought to the more parochial but hearty fare. We ate sweet pork buns, steamed rice crepes, fried bread, rice rolls wrapped in banana leaves.
After our first few lunches, I invited him home. He was already adapted to our habits of eating and drinking. Still, my wife made sure we served only cooked vegetables and beef, well done. We excluded one of my favorites, green papaya salad, because it was raw. Our water, my wife decided, should be just fine even for an American. It was always boiled first, left to cool, and then filtered. Still, when we were seated at the table, I was surprised to see bottled water instead. In the center tray was an impressive mound of appetizers—spring rolls, grilled lemongrass beef wrapped in grape leaves, crab claws fried with a dash of salt and pepper.
Cliff arrived in uniform. He was broad-shouldered; the carriage of his body was soldierly, angular, and erect. He spoke a few sentences in Vietnamese to show that he had learned the language and was making an effort. And for the rest of the evening we alternated between French and English. A half-smile lingered perpetually on his face, as if he would allow himself only a half dose of pleasure.
He had a wife and three sons, nineteen, seventeen, and sixteen, at home somewhere in New York, not in the city but in the mountains. I pictured pristine streams where he taught his sons to fish, fields of flowers through which they ran. My wife reciprocated with the basic facts about our family. “Yes, two girls,” she said, her face opening up exquisitely. “Mai and Khanh, inseparable.” While I struggled with the corkscrew in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, I could hear pleasantries being exchanged. My wife told Cliff about her family being from the rice-growing Mekong Delta and mine being from Laos. “But he’s Vietnamese,” she added. Cliff nodded and asked if there were many Laotians in Vietnam. “No,” she said. “But many Chinese.” Moments later, when Cliff expressed an interest in the lacquer paintings on the walls, she seemed pleased and led him to her two favorite paintings. “Look at these,” she said proudly.
“I drove to several factories that m
ake ceramics and lacquered products but didn’t see anything as beautiful as these. I’d like to buy a few to send back home,” Cliff said.
“You need to go to the right place. We’ll take you to Bien Hoa, about an hour away. The best factories are there. These paintings have more than ten layers of lacquer. They won’t crack. So you see they are beautifully polished. Here is a traditional Buddhist scene,” she said. “A lotus pond which is meant to convey serenity.”
“I can see the superior quality here,” Cliff said agreeably.
“And this one is of the two women warriors in our history who rode on elephant backs, led an army, and defeated invaders from China,” she explained.
“Yes, yes, I’m quite aware of the Trung Sisters. I had read about them when I was preparing to come to Vietnam. And your husband here has invoked their names many times since we’ve become friends,” Cliff said, his smile lingering as he examined the lacquered details. “I understand they weren’t the only woman warriors either.”
“True. We also have Madame Trieu,” my wife explained appreciatively.
“I do believe she was the one who uttered the famous words about riding the tempest and taming the waves and rejecting the lot of women who bow their heads.” Cliff sipped his wine and slyly winked at me.
My wife’s eyebrows shot up. She was impressed. “That’s right. And those women are quite representative of Vietnamese women in general, I should add,” she said. Her voice dropped as she looked at me to confirm her assertion.
