The Lotus and the Storm

by Lan Cao

  “Galileo, Galileo,” Galileo says.

  “What a good bird,” Grandma clucks. She fusses over the bird. She gives him a piece of bread as a midafternoon snack. Galileo snatches it from her hand, then dunks it into a bowl of water before swallowing it. When I run a finger along his feathery breast, he tilts his head and opens his beak ever so slightly, as if he were being tickled into a trance. I cup Galileo in my hands and together we watch the rain pour from the eaves and drainpipes of our house. My cricket puts out a contented chirp from the sanctuary of its matchbox.

  Galileo does not merely mimic. He listens and understands and knows the meaning of words. If I sit by myself and stare, he will ask, “Sad?”

  Right now, he is on a roll, showing off an enviable repertoire of sounds, words, and phrases. Soon a game between Galileo and Grandma develops.

  “Is that the phone ringing?” Grandma asks.

  “No! No, me, me,” the bird says as he makes a trilling sound.

  “Is that the rumbling of a motor?”

  “Nooooh!”

  “Is somebody snoring in the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Noooo!”

  Grandma looks at me and asks once again with evident hope and optimism in her voice, “Have you been teaching him? You talk to him?”

  I shake my head.

  “How is he picking up all these new words? Someone is playing with him and teaching him. By God, he’s talking. Not just repeating a word here and a word there.”

  You are, I want to say. Stop pretending. But I shrug. Maybe he is a smart bird who figures out his own name because he hears Grandma refer to him as Galileo. There is a rush of air as Galileo spreads his wings and strikes a dramatic pose. He turns toward me. “Talk, talk. Play, play. Come. Cecile, Cecile,” he sings.

  Cecile? Who is Cecile, I wonder. What a marvel. Galileo has invented a new game for us.

  “Come, Cecile. Ceceeeeel,” he continues. His eyes fix themselves on me. He hops toward me with his outstretched wings.

  I hesitate. I can almost see Cecile’s shadow by my side.

  “Cecile, Cecile,” he persists. He is wooing me out of my fortress of silence.

  I look around. A great humming stillness envelops me while a rush of movement jolts me from the inside out. I am acutely aware of a presence beside me, like a frolicking spirit that wishes to play by a swollen riverbank. Time streams by. There is another person present, I am sure of it, the same person who emerges at night and hovers nearby when I am in bed. A ghost. My sister, I think. The air conditioner squeaks. I am somewhere between being and not being, subsumed deep inside a long, drawn-out transition that sticks and sticks until finally I manage to break free with a big gasp, only to hear a full-flood scream from Galileo himself.

  “Cecile,” Galileo shrieks.

  “He has given you a pet name?” my Chinese grandmother asks. “How curious. How cute,” she says, laughing. “Playful bird.”

  Where did he get such a name, I ask myself. I have read that animals have an innate ability to detect subtle shifts in their environment, such as the earth’s vibrations, or electrical charges in the air. I wonder if Galileo senses the presence I sense now and at night too. I look around.

  “Cecile plays. Cecile plays.”

  As I stand in dumb muteness, Galileo stomps his feet on the table’s surface and asks, over and over, “Do you like me? Do you like me? Mynah bird, mynah bird.”

  Grandma keeps silent and turns to me.

  A moment passes. Galileo tilts his head mournfully. I detect a faint movement of his cheeks, as if he were attempting a smile. I smile back.

  “You like me? Mynah bird. Nice bird.”

  I say nothing. My silence stubbornly persists.

  “You’re hurting his feelings, maybe,” Grandma says.

  He makes wiping motions. He cranes his neck sideways, rubbing his eyes against his feathered wings, as if to wipe off a tear.

  I have no choice but to reassure him. “I like you,” I confess. “I really do.”

  It is a whispery rasp of a voice. It is mine.

  The cricket emits a sound, as if surprised. I hear a high-pitched, pulsing chirp vibrating through his body. Galileo stares at me as if through the sides of his eyes and hops on my shoulder.

  “Cecile,” he coos.

  “Hello,” he says. “Hello, Cecile.”

  My Chinese grandmother shakes her head in disbelief.

  • • •

  Father continues to sit quietly at night by himself. Mother has stopped paying attention to our garden. A gardener has been hired to watch over the errant vines, gather the carcasses of mangoes that drop from the tree, fertilize our frangipani blooms. Mother spends her evenings inside her grief.

  But the fact that I have reclaimed my voice delights them both. This is new. This is hopeful. At least it is not bad news. It is not another failure. It no longer takes much to please them.

  I am partly relieved and partly disappointed. To my surprise, I miss the challenge. Once, I was capable of meeting their wishes. Now, as if deciding that their combined objectives for me might need a degree of clear-eyed adjustment, they are ready to adapt and expect less. They are now willing to live with imperfections and compromise. I am their only remaining child, one evidently not destined to prosper. The simple truth is that all their efforts are directed by their fear that I will stop talking once again.

  “I’m happy,” Father says. “I’m happy you are talking. If you don’t talk, how can you do well in school? If you don’t do well in school, how will you fare when you grow up . . .”

  Growing up is too far in the future for me to worry about now. Still, I nod to reassure him.

  Both parents wish to spoil Galileo and remind my Chinese grandmother that he is to get whatever he wants. But Galileo does not want much besides regular changes of newspaper for his cage or morsels of mangoes and papayas. My parents insist: Perhaps Galileo can be cajoled into a taste of Japanese royal persimmon, or a Korean pear, each lovingly coddled in a rice-paper-thin wrapper. Sensing encouragement and adulation, Galileo goes about performing and preening.

  Fear that I might regress into silence has humbled my parents. They willingly rely on the bird for help. They also want to find out more about James. “What a miracle he is,” they proclaim. “We are indebted to him,” Mother says. She believes if a debt is incurred it must be repaid.

  “Who is he? How did you meet him?”

  My Chinese grandmother explains that he is an American soldier—a sergeant. “Oh, him, yes,” our father exclaims. Our father remembers that James was there when my sister died. James is a mere youngster, as he puts it, who is attached to the military police compound down the street.

  “The girls used to spend almost every evening with him listening to music.” Our Chinese grandmother fills our mother in on the way we were, tapping her foot and moving her shoulders ever so lightly as memories course through her.

  I am amused. I have never seen our grandmother’s moves. Our parents look at each other obliquely. Whatever thought each has separately is ultimately shared by the other. After a few moments, they nod, as if in agreement about something. An understanding is sealed in a glance here, a nod there, as if anything more explicit were extraneous, even unbecoming.

  It is the first time I have seen such a visible display of complicity on their part. A few weeks later I discover what all the nodding and sidelong glances were about.

  • • •

  The next time I see James he is in our dining room. By then I am talking again and by all outward appearances my normal self. He stands uncertainly by the table. It is the first time he has been inside our house. He clears his throat, then says hello. My parents have decided that James will be my tutor. They have both come to realize that the foreign language I should be learning is English, not French. And so for the sake of my f
uture, for the sake of my newly minted life, they approached him. They do not know James, but he might have a faculty that ministers to the past and ushers in a different, more positive future for me.

  And so that is how my second life with James begins. The language that my sister would have wished to learn, as she once announced after doing a gorgeous imitation of Mick’s “Tell me.” English, the language of rock and roll. With it, my life with my sister can be resurrected. This, then, is our weekly tutorial. Galileo too participates by sitting on his usual perch on the windowsill, occasionally pecking at a pear washed and pared by my Chinese grandmother. James pronounces a word. I repeat it. Then Galileo. Later I might forget a word only to be reminded of it by Galileo. The bird eggs me on, still insisting on calling me Cecile.

  “Why do you give her a French nickname, Galileo?” James asks Galileo, laughing. “Why ‘Cecile’?”

  Eyes wide open, Galileo says nothing in response.

  Life outside our dining room where the lessons are taking place fades in and out. From the other side of the room, James paces back and forth, pointing to an object, a table and a pen, a book and a cup, in quick succession—somehow they are always configured in twos. I listen to his big-booted thump against the tiled floor. Even off duty, he wears his military uniform. My eyes fall onto the crisp, starched folds of his shirt, the insignia that signifies rank or accomplishment. We are still in the vocabulary phase of our lesson but soon we will embark on grammatical phrases and more. I already know some English from watching American television. James is an eager teacher. This is an elbow. This is a stomach. This is a jaw. We go from nouns to verbs to adjectives. I nod avidly. I rarely fail him. The buildup of what is asked of me is gradual but certain.

  On our occasional walks in the garden he points out flowers and insects to me. This is a butterfly. This is a rose. This is a funny mynah bird. This is a cricket. I show him a cluster of touch-me-nots that we call bashful plants. I flick a finger hard against a bunch of leaves and watch as they close in the blink of an eye. James sits close to the ground and blows soft breaths onto their wing tips. Slowly, slowly, they purr and hesitate, then fold up into themselves. I am delighted. James is willing to sit with me as we both wait patiently for them to open up again.

  “How’s everyone? Everyone okay?” he asks in a schoolteacher voice.

  “It’s hard to say,” I answer. That the conversation seems to be part of an English lesson makes it easier for me to talk. “We are fine,” I finally say, covering my face with my hand.

  “I bite my nails too, see?” He shows me his hands. The right thumb- nail is ragged. I put my hands behind my back. I know all my nails, not just the thumbnail, are chewed up. “It’s okay to feel bad,” James whispers.

  I nod. I do feel bad, almost like carsick. “Next time we can read a book. Listen to music. Maybe even play soccer.” His hand slaps his lap with each suggested activity.

  “I will like that,” I answer. It has become easy to talk to James. Even if there is no formal lesson plan, I will be able to manage a normal conversation with him.

  We are careful to talk quietly so we don’t disturb the bashful plant. Sure enough, after some time, it opens up, its leaves unfolding like a shiny, green revelation. I am thrilled that I am here to witness its opening. “Hello,” James murmurs to the plant. His stomach growls. The plant blushes in the soft wind but remains wide open. “C’mon, I’m hungry. But let’s do something else first,” he says.

  It is early evening. A cool breeze blows as James takes my hand. We walk toward the vacant field across from our house. “Soccer ball,” James says, pointing to a bin of balls stored in a wooden shed. We draw two lines on a wall, each signifying a goalpost. The point is to kick the ball between the two lines. James shows me many of the game’s inspired moves, the right fake and the left spin, the pinball swerve and the duck, the final scramble straight through a line of defense. He learned as a child to appreciate the game, its flow, the passes that are beautiful whether or not they produce points.

  “Come close and watch,” he says. The ball dances between his feet. He dribbles it to me. I kick it back. We are both delirious. He bounces it back and forth, up and down his bare knees, then runs with the ball glued to the tips of his shoes until it is released, bing, right between the two black marks on the wall. With each ball that James unleashes, he aims and aligns his entire being into the very arc of the ball. When his sneakers hit the ball, a solid thud can be heard. My heart beats loudly against my chest as I chase after him. Heat rises from the pinkness of my cheeks. There is James, with the perfect kicking leg, the calf muscles that flex. My Chinese grandmother, it turns out, has appeared and is watching us. She sits on a collapsible aluminum chair and cheers us on. She occasionally stops fanning herself to clap and hoot. Once in a while she even gets up and runs up and down the sidelines.

  When we return to the house a pitcher of lemonade, the salted kind, awaits us. My Chinese grandmother hands us both towels and insists we wash up. She offers us a tray of banh mi. James takes out a guitar and we strum and pluck our way through the remainder of the evening. We are in my house. My Chinese grandmother is nearby. The music has to be melodious to be house-sanctioned. Galileo and I listen adoringly as he sings “Yesterday.” I join in. I too can say the words and feel them form inside me.

  Coming from him, the lyrics soar and wrap themselves around us, taking us in and holding us close. I am a rogue child claimed by a sudden sense of happiness. Coming from James, the song feels singularly personal. It is about us. It seizes our very being. We are singing about the same yesterday, or some imperfect prototype of it. I am doing it in English. This might be one way of negotiating the crossover into a new beginning, by preserving the essence of our shared past. Let it be enough to produce happiness. Let it be the way for us as we struggle to cross that line between what we expect and what we can actually get.

  • • •

  It might be purely my imagination, but I believe Mother is undergoing a transformation. Still, emanating from her room is the usual sullen and accusatory quiet that seals her from the world beyond. But she no longer disappears into the throng of well-meaning but exhausting visitors whose dealings and demands tire her out.

  With my Chinese grandmother watching over him, Galileo is even allowed to enter the breakfast room. I sense it is for my sake, but our mother fusses over him too.

  “Cecile, Cecile,” he calls to me. I watch as Galileo gently takes a mango slice from our mother’s hand. It is breakfast time. My parents give each other a questioning look and seem amused that Galileo has come up with a pet name for me.

  “Ask for more, Galileo,” I coach. I come toward him, proffering my arm as a perch. “Come, come,” I whisper.

  Galileo cocks his head and jumps away from me. “Cecile.”

  I am baffled. The skin on my arms pricks up. The bird continues to look at me but asks for Cecile instead.

  Our mother chuckles and offers my bird more mango. I look at her with admiration. She is a woman whose beauty refuses to fade. Her well-being might be provisional but it is taking shape. Father encourages it.

  • • •

  As I try to fall asleep, I am startled by the sound of an unconcealed cry. I listen. It does not get louder as I lie there listening, and soon it fades. Our mother is not losing control. She will be sleeping soon enough. But this time, an emptiness enters me that asks not to be left alone but to be touched.

  My body answers her cry. And so I get up and walk into her room. I see the form of her body under the blanket, its trembling rise and fall. As I slip into bed with her, she turns around to face me and draws me against her breasts. In that moment, I breathe in her scent and absorb her continuing sadness into mine. I realize how I have longed for her touch.

  10

  Across the Border

  MR. MINH, 1967, 2006

  True, the country was covered in virgin
jungles. The enemy ambushed, then retreated into its deep greenery. And there was also the fog, which might not evaporate even when it was subjected to the implacable heat. It would hang there, along the shoreline and even inland. A soft wind could loft it higher or lower, over the rice fields or above the mountain peaks, but there it would remain. In war, especially this war, where the enemy was already invisible, fog was something to be feared. It suggested opportunities for cover, camouflage, and conspiracy. It meant that the air was alive in a spooky, ghostly way. Phantoms swirled. Vapors floated. There were no straight lines, no definitive truths. Our vision was blurred. Everything became ambiguous. It was easy to imagine, with one sliver of our consciousness, those impassive eyes that followed our movements before pouncing.

  And so yes, there were thick jungles and dense foliage. And there was fog. We absorbed all of these facts into our mental coordinates. Still, how did the enemy melt, evaporate, disintegrate, disappear?

  The enemy did not. They went across the border into Cambodia. We knew that was the answer. But we needed evidence.

  It was out in the open at last, this matter of the porous border between Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Intelligence collected by III Corps indicated that the Communists were converting the Giong Bau area straddling the Cambodian–South Vietnamese border in Chau Doc Province into a base and shelter for their troops. The corps had tried to destroy the Communist forces there but after each encounter the enemy withdrew into technically neutral Cambodian territory where our forces were forbidden to enter. Aerial photographs confirmed our suspicion and pinpointed enemy movements, revealing faint smudges of enemy sanctuaries across the border in sovereign Cambodia, and later in Laos.

  A winding trail used as a North Vietnamese supply conduit snaked perceptibly, belligerently, through the eastern part of Cambodia. It was meticulously configured by battalions of engineers using cutting-edge Soviet and Chinese machinery. Radio operators, ordnance experts, platoons of drivers, and mechanics all came along to support the North’s army. Twenty thousand or more North Vietnamese regulars were pouring steadily into the South.