The Lotus and the Storm

by Lan Cao

  Everyone around us, the dispensable humanity of the South itself, was suffering. Your Chinese nanny went to the countryside, as did many, to scavenge for food from the earth, to fish for food from the water. For us, with our valuables hidden away, there was still a mercifully viable black market. Even if every other shop in Cholon had been boarded up and even if there were no private stores anymore, we could still buy our rice underground, from Quy’s Chinese friends who had a network of warehouses scattered throughout Cholon and the countryside.

  We suspected you would be sending letters and packages to our old addresses, but I was not hopeful they would reach us. The Ministry of Interior made a point of inspecting and confiscating international mail, especially if they believed it might contain money or valuables.

  Any package from abroad was like deliverance. People relied on them to survive. Over time, a new system was instituted: All packages would be delivered to a government-run parcels store, a shabby, odorous room on a nondescript side street I’d never been to. Your brother-in-law and I and sometimes Quy went there to check for mail from you and Mai. It was your whereabouts and your return address we were eager for.

  Inside this provisional building, hundreds of people could be found lumbering about. We stood in line and waited for our names to be called. With silent intensity, men in blue trousers sliced open packages and poured the contents onto the Formica counter. They would then be carefully examined and recorded in ledgers for customs duty. Behind them, on the peeling walls, were hung long lists of tax rates: sugar, 80 percent; clothes and fabric, 25 percent; cameras, 30 percent; medicine, 200 percent; alcohol, 50 percent. People paid the high import duties and even the penitential bribe to the poverty-stricken bureaucrats to have their packages released. We could sell the goods for ten times their worth on the black market.

  Every other day we stopped by just in case. I suspected Quy also ventured there herself, to check for your letters, after her customary visits to your daughter’s grave. She never allowed anyone to accompany her to the cemetery. She would carry a bowl of uncooked rice and a few sticks of incense and head out the door to pass the day inside the immense comfort of cemetery walls, on the patch of earth that surrounded the headstone. I had been there myself with your brother-in-law. Your wife had kept it immaculate. The cemetery housed the South’s dead, so the grave sites of those whose families had left were unkempt. The government’s cemetery keeper was there merely to open and close the gates, nothing more. Among burnished gravestones there were many that were chipped and others that were choked by the tangles and brambles of swollen vines. Quy replaced the rice bowl on your daughter’s grave several times a week. The grassy stretch on which the grave sat was weeded, watered, and well tended.

  Quy left the house every morning and did not return until night.

  Day after day we continued in that same meandering, languishing way, making do by selling trinkets and buying rice, canned milk, sugar, and other produce on the black market. I worried about how much gold Quy still had. I had caught a glimpse of her one evening going through what I assumed was a dwindling satchel of gold and other valuables.

  One day Quy came back from Cholon and delivered the news to her brother. Against all sense of conventional decency, Chinese schools in Cholon had been ordered closed. Almost all the shops were tightly shuttered. The rice and pharmaceutical businesses of her friends aunts number such-and-such had been confiscated. Her brother looked at his sister with the responsiveness of one eager to placate and please.

  Up until now, even in her lowest moments, she had referred to a vague “they,” as yet undefined, as the cause of our misery. But this time, she meant that her brother had brought this on. We will be the ones to bear the brunt. Look at what your revolution has wreaked, she said.

  The truth was, though we didn’t know it yet, that her brother, and others like him, even the South itself, had to be driven to their knees. It would have been comforting to call it destiny except that destiny would not have allowed its true colors to be revealed with such drab, partisan incompetence. Still, we expected to be the exception. We thought we could rely on your brother-in-law’s credentials. He had devoted his life to the cause. But one night your brother-in-law revealed a grave fact to me. He had stopped me, saying he wanted to talk. I knew something was wrong. He grabbed my arm and lowered his voice. He pulled me closer to him and warned about possible danger ahead. I could scarcely believe what I heard in the next few minutes.

  He said that over the years he had thought about defecting to the South. He had had doubts. He had even shared them with you, he said, turning over sensitive Vietcong secrets to you. His was not a fluctuation of wills but a true vacillation of the heart. He didn’t go through with it but he had shared his doubts with a few friends. He could foresee how this indiscretion might now be damaging. He could be considered a traitor and placed in the category of those who committed everlasting wrongs against the revolution.

  Why was he worried now? I asked. He did not know. He suspected someone had leaked the information. He had made a few harmless little noises, softly urging against the collectivization of private property in the South. I am the son of a landlord, he had declared a few months back. I know peasants. They want a little piece of land they can call their own, he had cautioned. You cannot just take their land and their water buffaloes.

  They had confronted him in the most mundane of ways. A knock on the door, questions from the police, an exchange of lowered voices. Two minutes later he was taken away.

  Two days later, there was another knock. My wife and Quy were there when it happened. He is an invalid, they said frantically. Only one leg. Look. Thu rolled up the bottom of my pants to reveal the fleshly incompleteness obscured by the ordinariness of my trousers. I held myself steady even as they fumbled to pull at my pants. Quy took a fork and clanged it against my leg. The metallic sound was but an inconsequential abstraction to the cadres, who merely shrugged. It was this very sound, the tinkle of metal, that I heard over and over in my cell in the coming years. I answered their questions with alacrity. Thu and Quy did their best to intervene.

  I was loaded on a truck parked at a nearby school and, along with others, transported in the darkness of night through provincial roads that were sometimes smooth, sometimes rutted. On that ride I realized I was experiencing what the rest of the country was experiencing. The subjugation of the South. It was something that had been long planned and was now emerging like a tree taking the shape contained in a seed before its planting.

  As we crossed a bridge, its metal surface vibrated against the wheels. I noticed every sound: the throttling of engines, the creak of wheels over railroad tracks, the grunts of the driver and the guards. We were summarily unloaded. Near evening, alone in my cell, leaning my upper torso as far out as possible toward the crack in the wall to take in a breath of fresh air, I could smell only a sickly stench of vomit and excrement. An ammoniac stink pervaded the area. Cracks in the foundation were lined with rot. Neither the walls, the floors, nor the ceiling ever cooled, even at night, which led me to think this particular cell must be in the middle of a flat, unshaded area vulnerable to the broiling glare of the sun. A sheen of perspiration glistened perpetually on my skin, coating the pores with a saltiness that I could almost taste. Torture, as I discovered soon enough, had to be consummated in the raw shimmer of sweat. The experiment in cruelty was itself far from aberrant.

  Both my hands were shackled to the prosthesis. The only time my right hand was released was at mealtime, when a bowl of rice mixed with sand was pushed across the door’s threshold. The guard announced that it was prepared just so, to remind us of our crimes. Loudspeakers urged us to confess past wrongs and exhorted us to welcome the new future. In the evening an intervening silence consumed my cell. I began to long for company. At night the windowless cell sometimes flared with light from a naked ceiling bulb. Other times there was only an echoing, ancient darkness and
an occasional sound from the other side of the wall that signaled shadow lives in close proximity but beyond my reach. Sometimes a magnanimous guard would take pity and unyoke me from one of the handcuffs so I could fold into a partial, even if still contorted, sleeping pose. Nightmares plagued the fugitive night. In the sweat and heat of the cell, scraps of ocher rust collected on my metal leg. What mattered most in this room that scarcely permitted any light were the simplest of pleasures. I waited for that moment during the day, even though the precise instant could never be foretold, giving rise to perpetual hope, when I would be told I could now lie flat on the floor, or stand up straight, once more, or even move myself from one end of the cell to the other in five short steps. Time passed—a few days, a week, two, more—an illusory continuity that provided no solace. It was the mystery of not knowing that weighed on me. A guard would enter the room every once in a while. He would issue orders with icy perfection. “Repent! Have you repented?” We were all open to mockery. When I asked what I should be repenting for, he replied, as if to deepen the riddle, with a question and an order. Don’t you know? Think.

  Of course, to admit to repentance was to admit to past sins. The guard was well pleased with the perplexity of his own scripted abstractedness, the threat and promise of ambiguity. Regret, repent, remorse, questions of nomenclature that, here at least, determined the very nature of one’s existence in the cell. I asked for the manacles to be removed. When you repent.

  Repentance was the answer that was meant to exact considered submission and provide the opening through which you could walk penitentially into a different, untwisted, unbound mode of being. Soon enough I could imagine all forms of confession willingly, though injudiciously, delivered in exchange for freedom.

  Bugs, ants, cockroaches, materialized from cracks in the walls and floor, providing me with company. For a few days, a lizard hung from the ceiling. Its pale belly slithered, its long body and tail quicksilver lithe. Its creamy whiteness complemented the beige ceiling. You started to live in the smallest of details, your imagination easily captured. For several days I stared at and talked to it. It was the lizard who roused me, even sparked my imagination. If I survive this, I will make the hours and days count, I said to myself.

  One early dawn amid a surge of frantic purpose, a guard walked in and carried me to another room where all manner of activities were being concentrated. A crowd of about seventy was jammed in against the walls of a room fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long. As the door opened, havoc broke loose. There was a collective scramble toward the morning’s first light, causing several to surge forward in an effusion of curiosity about me, the newcomer. Dusty carcasses of moths and flinty grit of fragile wings fluttered in the air. There was talking and clearing of lungs, tubercular coughing and other derelict noises, jostling, sighing, crying. Faces loomed awkwardly above me. Fleshless men stared. The guard carrying me let go of me and I dropped. I could hear the metallic clack my limb made on the floor even as my head banged against something hard. For a few moments, I could see only blackness spinning against my brain’s central lobe. I felt only a rising pressure against my eyes and temples. A pall of darkness rose from the floor, stippled with pulsating particles and dots. A low roar vibrated in my ears until finally volume returned.

  What is the matter with him? Give him air. Loosen his shirt collar. People assumed their parts, emphatically shouting emergency wisdom. Even in their diminished state, even in my condition, I was able to recognize some of them as neighbors and acquaintances, Buddhist monks with shaved heads, former soldiers of the vanquished South, each, like me, a nameless prisoner haunted by evocations of wartime turbulence. I saw their thin, wasted bodies, their shaved heads blotched with sores, clots of soft scabs not fully hardened, and the driblets of spittle threaded with blood on the discolored floor. Many had been duped. They were told to bring one week’s worth of clothes and to report “in a spirit of genuine remorse” to the accruing Communist forces for mild reeducation sessions. They had expected to stay but one week. My neighbor’s son came with only three sets of summer shirts and khakis and had not been heard from for three years.

  In the shrouded indoor light, my eyes latched onto one face immediately. It was your brother-in-law’s, whose lot was cast with mine here in this cell. His cheeks were grimed and his eyes watery. He was being taken out of this cell as I was being brought in. Did these prisoners know of his convoluted Vietcong past but had somehow opted to grant him a long reprieve rather than exact revenge? Perhaps now, finding themselves here after so many years of war and suffering, they had all pitched their sight on something else altogether, away from blame and vengeance to embrace a more absolving, compassionate perspective. At least this was what I hoped.

  Water was splashed in my face. A pair of hands touched my lapel, shaking me and rousing me forth. Soon enough, all of us here would be huddled together, bound by the same pain and loneliness.

  I was the only amputee. I was allowed the most space as the more able-bodied made room for me. I could lie down while others slept sitting up, one leaning against the other, each in his own internal solitude.

  They knew how to divide us. Critique him, I was ordered one day. I was shown another man’s written confession. Then it was passed from one to the other. We were inside the clutch of absolute authority. We were commanded to judge the chronicles of others on a monthly basis. Whoever was deemed by most in the cell to be the weakest or the laziest would receive special treatment: no breakfast, no lunch, and only a small handful of stale rice for dinner for the rest of the month.

  Soon enough, I began to fear the suspicion, anxiety, and mistrust sowed in every frame and sequence of thought. Privacy had to be invented, by averting others’ eyes. Still, emotions could be glimpsed, stories shared.

  A lifelong southern Communist declared himself free of illusions. Like a monk, he smiled weakly, now stripped of his usual panoply of postures, positions, and politics, and alone without possessions. He was, like me, embracing the stark primitive but showing none of its effect. For weeks, he said nothing and looked at no one. And then one day, there he was, suddenly standing on tiptoe, atop a limp body, positioning his eyes just so in front of a narrow crack in the wall to take in a sliver of the outside world. I made contact with him only because I was the limp body under his feet. He was a hothouse of memory and consciousness. He looked down at me with a purposeful stare and spoke with a spiritedness I had not seen till then. His voice registered clearly even in its diminished form. He had spent years in prison, under the French, under Diem, Thieu, and now under the Communists. “My dream now is not to be released,” he said as he paused and looked at me to see if I understood his showdown with life’s disappointments and discontents. “It is not to see my family.” He paused so we could together ponder this unintelligible suggestion. “My dream is to be back in a French prison thirty years ago.” It was not the strain of fatalism but rather the self-inflicted but irresistible desire for pain, for comfort in melancholy. In this encompassing moment, the balance had tipped. For the rest of his time in our cell until he was taken away, I never heard him say another word.

  And then one day I saw him again. He and another prisoner were standing together, two long silhouettes in the light. I was on the edge of a parched field, watering crops with a hose. Accustomed still to the indoor shade, I had to shield my eyes. An old Conex box, used as a freight container, lay indifferently under the sun’s light and heat. It was four feet wide and four feet high on the far side of an adjoining lot. They were there, in the purple silence, where men were made to walk, methodically and fatalistic, clearing mines. I knew immediately who the other man was. I could not make out the face clearly, but I deferred to an innate sense of certainty. It was your brother-in-law. He saw me. And I saw him. We looked at each other and that was it.

  No one in here could forget or would forget. We were saddled, one way or another, with the weight of our past lives.

 
There were no walls to impede escape, just one slender strand of barbed wire and no watchtowers. No one escaped because we were reminded with magnificent poignancy that our parents and wives and children would be killed if an attempt was made. They knew the names of our relatives. They let it be known that our relatives had been paid visits.

  “Your sister is a beautiful woman,” one of the cadres had told your brother-in-law. “Her name is Quy?” the cadre asked.

  Your brother-in-law nodded. In that drab instant, any incipient sense of opposition immediately dissipated. Of course those questions had an immediate quieting effect on us.

  “She lives with a girlfriend, yes? She is alone, husband also away? In fact, husband is also here to repent.” Following such questions, you can imagine that our complete submission need neither be compelled nor devised.

  Before he left, the cadre told your brother-in-law, “We hate traitors more than we hate the enemy. Even traitors who only contemplated defection and treachery. Remember that.”

  It all seemed very hopeless until the door opened one day and your brother-in-law was suddenly brought into our cell on a stretcher.

  “A real cell instead of a Conex freight box for you,” the guard announced.

  Your brother-in-law was unloaded. His body dropped to the floor. He felt like a cold, inanimate thing. His body had shrunken. The flesh and bones had changed shape to fit the tight enclosures of the metal freight box. Still, the moment felt light. I could sense it. Our fortune, defying circumstances, would change. Even the head guard had given me a benevolent look, something inestimable a few days before. Something had changed irrefutably. His seemingly unlabored overtures, the sudden undepleted reservoir of goodwill, surprised us at first. Then came the great prosperity of rice doled out in extra large proportions, the occasional morsel of pork, and a smile now and then, and even a cigarette or two for me. One day a piece of paper was slipped to us. It was partially torn and wrinkled but the writing was clearly your wife’s and it was revelatory. “We finally found out where you are. Don’t give up. You will be out soon.” More than ever, I wished for her unequivocal presence and dreamed, once more, the only dream worth dreaming.