by Lan Cao
I feel an inflatable cuff against my upper arm. The doctor squeezes a rubber bulb until it gets larger and larger and then at a certain point he releases the pressure. My Chinese grandmother is nearby, watching with knowing eyes as the doctor asks my parents questions. I hear this and that.
“She just faints?”
My parents look at each other, then nod. “That is what the principal tells us,” Mother answers.
“Low blood pressure,” the doctor says, as if that should explain it all.
Mother holds my hand as a needle is inserted to take my blood. She looks ardently at me and whispers assurances. “Close your eyes,” she says. I do not need to be coaxed but my fears lie elsewhere. I hold my breath and close my eyes. I imagine a yellow beak nudging me. I know the calm is provisional. The voices can start at any time.
It is all the more important, then, to be vigilant. I hold on to our mother’s hand with one hand and to the armrest with the other. I keep myself anchored that way, to hold the moment. Let this be enough. Let this be enough.
Days later, the blood test results tell us that everything is normal.
• • •
I begin to think of boxes. Time can be unwound and stored inside four metal corners. I begin to strategize against these recurring ambushes. I find an old tin box with elaborate pictures of dragons and celestial beasts. I draw a picture of the angry face and solemnly place the picture in the box. I convince myself that I have caught a monster from the ocean’s ominous depths and sequestered it in a secure, metallic compartment. I put the box under my bed. It keeps her—the interloper—locked away.
For a moment, as I slip my drawing into the box, I have another glimpse of her as the stormy, dark-eyed stranger who shoved me into the jar and kept me from shouting my warning to James.
Outside, insects drone their disapproval in the suffocating dankness of the summer’s humidity. I am deafened by the din, by the discordance of internal combustion that rises higher and higher in the slipstream of my mind. She stands there at the ocean’s rim, ready to grab me whenever she wants to.
After I close the box, I feel better immediately.
• • •
Sometimes Mother takes me with her when she goes about her activities. For months now she has been planning a benefit event with Cliff. But there are still many things to do.
This is Saigon and it is 1971.
Father is not home this Sunday. It rained last night and there is a silky, clean feeling to the morning. Our front door opens, ready to receive the rush of air from a rogue wind that remains even as the rain has left for the coast. We have errands to run, things to do. It is destined to be a fine day as we wait for Cliff. As vendors hawk their breakfast preparations, I sit in front of the house watching them as Mother gets herself ready upstairs. A dog greedily chases its tail. I remember that Mother’s favorite composer, Chopin, wrote the Minute Waltz about a dog and its frantic tail. A tamarind pod scrapes against the sidewalk. When Mother comes down from her bedroom, she looks gorgeous, almost imperial. She is wearing high-heeled pumps with spangles that sparkle. The wind blows through the two gleaming folds of her satiny ao dai. At this moment I am filled with love for her.
I know what she has become. She is at once a mother and not a mother. I want to touch both her clarity and her mystery.
Cliff arrives and whisks us away in a black Opel. Our mother tells me she has something planned that I will like very much. Cliff drives nonchalantly into the Saigon traffic, joining its unstoppable flow. Every car, ours included, speeds along unless it has to stop to avoid a collision. Once we have escaped the crisscrossing traffic, Cliff lowers his window to usher in the breeze. The rush of air produces a constant hum and whips up Mother’s long hair. She shakes her head and smiles as Cliff tells her something. When she struggles to crank her own window down, Cliff stops the car by the roadside and reaches across to help. He holds her hand and together they turn the handle. It is stuck. They try again. The tips of his fingers wrap around her wrist.
As he returns to his seat and drives, Mother snakes her body out the passenger side window and begins to photograph the passing scenery with her camera. The ao dai glistens and clings to her slender frame before it unspools and delivers a glossy whiteness into the transport of wind.
Cliff whistles. He handles her with a casual ease, as if she were without any sadness, and so she is. He reaches over and pulls her back in.
She is oblivious to the speed of the car. Everything will be blurry, I think to myself as I watch her click randomly at this and that.
The car stops in front of a little house. As the three of us walk toward the front door, I hear a steady drumbeat and stop. A gritty guitar riff, part rancor and part melody. Growling vocals. It is rock and roll. I look at our mother. It is not her kind of music. But it is the kind I once loved.
An elderly woman opens the door and invites us in. The sweet reek of incense permeates the house. On the table are a teapot and cups. She has been expecting us. A group of four young men are in the room. There is a full arrangement of drums, a guitar, an electric piano, and a saxophone. The elderly woman speaks to our mother in Vietnamese and points to the four young men as if she has no choice but to suffer them the way one suffers wayward children. She addresses them as con, “children,” hers. Mother smiles and asks them to play American rock music for us. “This American here,” she says, pointing to Cliff, “has heard you all at a club and he likes your music.”
They are high school students who want only to play music. Even their appearance, four Vietnamese boys with mops of riotous hair flung across their faces, works to the music’s advantage. They strum and work their way into the hushed glow of the melody. Another riffs while the drummer keeps a catchy, insistent beat. The singer leads with his mood. The voice is nervously wrought, velvety, hushed at first and then louder, wilder. The other three support the song with their instruments and harmonies, hitting all the customary rock-and-roll thrills until the precision-timed moment when they let it all out.
Here it is, all together now: the title of the song, “Love Potion No. 9.” The song’s title, which doubles as a verse, is bare and beautiful as it is sung with exuberance.
I suppress the urge to clap. More songs follow. I know the beat and the hustle. I know the thrill of it. I look at Mother. She is an exalted presence. Her breastbone makes a prominent V. I look at Cliff. Cliff knows she is beautiful. He stands next to her, long-legged and supple-bodied, his eyes green and dreamy, snapping his fingers and shaking his head to the beat. They are positioned side by side, pressed inevitably into moving and swaying, even if just for a little bit.
For one moment, I can almost see my sister in her usual wondering presence. I plunge into it. I try to stretch out the fleeting memory, to inhabit it. The spell is not broken. There she is, dancing with James.
In the car Mother asks if I liked the group. I tell her yes and she says to Cliff, “We don’t have to see any other group, then. Let’s hire this one.”
When we get home, Mother and Cliff settle on our terrace to watch the sun recede under lavender skies. Mother smiles the way she does when she thinks about my sister. Cliff holds this twilight moment in him, his eyes taking it all in. She is next to me, inside a future unconnected to happiness. He is, conversely, inside a happiness unconnected to the future. I sit between them, looking at everything and nothing.
The cook has left but prepared a bucket of crabs fried with salt and pepper for us. It is food that requires you to dispense with chopsticks, forks, and knives and embrace fleshly force. Mother and Cliff pound the hard pink shells with a mallet. They use their bare hands to tear apart the claws, to halve the bodies, to pry apart the undersides. Etiquette is relinquished as they let themselves suck and slurp. They extract the meat from bright red claws and lick their fingers to taste a hint of salt and pepper, garlic and lime. I lick mine too. Mother scoops a clutch of
red coral eggs and slides it into her mouth. She nods silently at me, her hand outstretched with a dangling spoon aimed in the direction of my mouth. I gather from the gesture that she wants me to open up so she can feed me. She is the mother who is sometimes fine and sometimes not. They are in a good mood, reading a magazine and smiling. “Look at this,” our mother says, pointing at something in the Paris Match magazine she subscribes to. Cliff laughs heartily. Then he snaps up his head to look at a flock of black sparrows lifting their wings in flight across the sky. Although I am busy looking for crickets in the garden, they are within my line of sight.
I shoot them a look but try not to let my eyes trespass. I am aware of a current running between them and do not want to intercept it. I listen for my father’s return. I get myself as close as possible to the gate, where I will be able to hear the crunch of gravel as the wheels of his car head toward our driveway.
I am the family’s sentry. I am on guard to save feelings from being hurt. I do not want my father to see my mother like this. So happy with Cliff.
I tell Mother I am going to kick a ball around. I stand there agog, feeling the solid heft of stitched leather against my hands. James gave me this ball. I remind myself as I caress it, with complete fidelity to our time together, how a real soccer ball feels to the touch, weighted just so against the hand.
As the moments tick by, I keep my self-appointed vigil. I listen. Father’s jeep always sputters reliably. Still, I cock my ear back. When Father arrives, I will be ready. I will cough or sneeze. It does not matter if I lack subtlety. I might run noisily up the driveway and innocuously announce his return. “Father is home, Father is home.”
Father is here. But before I can say anything, he has already embraced me and asks why I am not with Mother and Papa Cliff. He knows more than I realize. I ally myself with him even as he chastises me. “You should not be so far away from them,” he says. His finger wags with disapproving abruptness.
I can only look at him and meekly shrug.
Before I know it, Father and I are already on the terrace. In front of us are the expectant eyes of our mother and Cliff. “Father is home,” I say. The sentence comes out of my mouth like a clunky declaration. Something in the air moves as Cliff looks up and sees that we have been there watching them. His eyes shrink into themselves before he casts a downward glance. I look at Father’s eyes as they follow Cliff’s gestures. I am seeing things as if at a different film speed, in jump cuts. The clarity stings. Mother smiles much more with Cliff than with our father and me.
Mother acknowledges Father’s presence sweetly, or rather, appropriately. “Anh,” she says. He puts his hand on her shoulder, quickly and with a tremble. She wraps her hand in his and declares that he looks tired and tense. Father nods. She knows him well enough to know. Through it all, they still have the asset of knowledge, the complicity of a common history. I remember Kieu’s verses our mother used to read to my sister and me. Like Kieu and Trong, our parents remain inseparable. They continue in defiance of reason or of suffering. They will sacrifice for the sake of love, I insist.
The sky is suddenly notched by the crenellated wings of swooping blackbirds. Almost in unison, my parents look at the arc of their flight, keeping their eyes on the horizon even as the soft smudges of blackness disappear from it. When I was little, I used to think they were returning home from school. Cliff stands there with his arms dangling by his side, taking in the fragrant evening, emanating self-consciousness, even a sense of disadvantage. He forces his lips into a half-smile. He looks down at his feet and mutters a few words about the time as he flashes an obliging smile. Father nods and they say their good-byes in the caressing light of a gray evening.
• • •
Overtaken by more blackouts, I am sent home from school again. Whatever my teacher saw caused her to describe the incident to Mother as something “like being possessed.” My Chinese grandmother, worried and beleaguered, looks me deeply in the eyes. She slips her hand into the crook of my elbow and takes me upstairs. She runs a bath and insists that I enter it. I lower myself into water that is almost too hot to bear. With surprising strength, she scrubs and scours me clean. Suds gather and bubble on the sponge. A white steam rises. I draw a long, noisy breath and hold fast, submitting myself to her ministration, her redemption.
When she is done, she wraps me in a large bath towel and dresses me. In the cold, sanitized bedroom that we share, with the air-conditioning at full blast, I am ordered to bed. She draws the curtains to darken the room. She lies next to me, watchful. I am aware that she is studying me and so I turn away and face the wall instead. I am half- asleep, half-awake. Voices work their way into my room.
“Mai, Mai,” my parents call. Are they pleased or irritated?
My parents are looking for me. I push myself reflexively into the folds of the blanket and shrink. But I know they know where I am and there is no possibility of remaining hidden, however desperately I want to spare them this version of myself.
Soon enough they will find me in a condition of intolerable wrongness.
The door opens. Determined, they move toward me, both ready to exercise their powers of reclamation and repossession. They have plans to have me fixed. I ignore her voice even as it emanates from within my head. She is the deranged one, locked in the box, I tell myself, trapped under a tin lid with dragons painted in blazing, raucous colors.
Father nudges me out of bed and takes me to the living area. An elderly man, slightly stooped and dressed in a black, flowing robe, looks up and gives me a knowing nod. “Here she is,” Father says. “Please take a look,” he adds, urgently.
And to me, he explains, “This is a thay phap.” A thay phap, I repeat—a revered teacher, a master of magical verses. I have never met one, but his presence is more reassuring than frightening. His skin is translucent and even the wrinkles are smooth. The room seems to have reorganized itself for his presence.
“Can we stay while you treat her?” my father asks, his face clenching up.
“No, we can’t,” my mother interjects.
“That’s right,” the thay phap agrees. “That’s not a good idea. It’s a delicate situation and I need to be alone with her.”
My father sighs. He is reluctant to leave me, but our mother insists and tells me they will be right outside.
Here I am before him, wrapped inside an elastic silence finally punctured by a slow, monotone chant. The thay phap reads. I see reams of yellow paper and miniature columns of black ink. He is parting through the submerged mystery and petitioning the spirits for intercession and protection. His face flushes, his breathing becomes labored. For a moment I fear that he will stumble into my little secret and its elusive mystery. He strikes a match and burns incense. Silhouettes of smoke float and drift like vaporous spirits momentarily visiting the earth. A long-drawn-out sound, almost effortless, comes out of his mouth, like an ecstatic wail with a whip at the end. It continues, without rhythm or pulse, without form or natural progression, scratching the lungs, steely, sharp, piercing the skin. The cords of his neck bulge. Our eyes lock. I feel something creep softly against the surface of my skin. The thay phap’s face lightens and expands into a smile.
He pauses. I hold my breath and watch. He comes toward me. He takes my chin in his hand and turns my face this way and that and asks for my cooperation as he performs a ritual.
“Len dong, eh? Little one? This is what it means. I will offer myself up as a medium to be occupied by the spirits we are trying to call,” he explains. “They will help you.”
I nod. As long as there is a chance that I can be fixed, I am willing to cooperate.
He dons a strange red costume that reminds me of the imperial court’s dresses worn by kings, queens, and courtiers from premodern times. I watch as he slides into himself and converges with the consciousness of spirits invoked, as a swimmer would glide through the water’s shimmering surface. In this ne
w persona, he is loose-limbed, boneless but muscular, thrashing like a reticulated python. A queer chant emerges from his mouth and passes through me as it rushes into open space. He is conversing with the spirits in an elocution of jangles and grunts. You can practically see the spirits quiver and vibrate like live wires along his skin, their plucked ends crackling and spitting sparks. He is taken over and occupied by an agitation of loose power. My bare skin feels the rising heat. I close my eyes. The tropical sun is upon us. It blisters our skin. The thay phap has become a hot, hissing column of flesh, his satiny costume shining like snakeskin.
My bones ache. The thay phap dances inside a deeper darkness lit only by candles and incense. Occasionally he stops and consults several books.
A sweet, smoky odor permeates the room. It is not just a possession any longer. It is something mutual that is happening between him and the spirits. It is a visitation. The thay phap winds down the shaman’s dance. The room smokes. He returns to himself slowly but surely. I freeze, but it is only the wind’s breath that briefly unsettles the folds of his robe.
I remain transfixed. Here are the instruments that promise cure and comfort: a pile of books, some joss sticks, a verse, and a chant.
The thay phap removes glossy squares of ritual papers from a bag and puts them in a metal bowl. He is meticulous. Flames jump upward from the bowl when he strikes a match. He cups his hands around the blue-orange fire as if to contain it. His skin glows against the light. From his pocket he takes a vial of water and pours it into the bowl, mixing the liquid with silvery ashes that have become soft and fragile to the touch. He parts my lips. “Drink,” he says. “Holy water.” It is odorless and gritty.
