Kim has never looked more beautiful. It is too late, but I wish I could tell her of the warmth and respect I harbor for her—for her tenacity, for her unblinking honesty, her selfless devotion to her family. She is very Vietnamese and very un-Vietnamese all at once. Fate is an obligation I don’t understand—the reasons that random beast passed over her deserving soul in favor of mine.
19
Jade-Giant
A great hue-and-cry rang throughout the refugee compound, wails and curses the likes of which were never heard again. A mob howled that their water supply had been poisoned.
We heard it from the railroad track where we were playing among the warehouses and freight yards. Within a few months of being stranded at the facility, Huy, Tien, and I, unable to enroll at the local Indonesian elementary school, had turned into dock rats. We scooted through a gap under the wall and brought up the tail of the mob. They were chasing someone along the edge of the compound, which wasn’t really a refugee facility—Jakarta didn’t officially have one. It was a low-security prison for petty foreign criminals and illegal aliens awaiting deportation, a sort of holding pen for live cargo in transition.
Apart from the crooks, there were four groups at the compound: refugees like our family; dock clerks and government officials; guards who kept an eye on everything; and the compound staff, which included servants, caretakers, and kitchen hands. It was the staff who were up in arms, screaming that the culprit had disgraced them, soiled them. They shouted horrible things. A terrible humiliation on their heads.
The chase turned the corner and rumbled through the front garden, right across the dignitary parking lot. The horde fixnneled back and forth through the warren of single-story structures that sprawled out into four wings, within which was a ramshackle of minor annexes, lean-tos, and two central courtyards. Shaking their fists, angry Indonesians in sarongs—poor running outfits—flip-flopped after their antagonist through offices and storage rooms, disrupting over a hundred inmates and clerks. We didn’t see the culprit until he raced down the other side of the compound, a little black head blitzing along a fence sprouting barbed-wire foliage. It was Hien.
I cornered one of the cooks, a massive old woman curtained in swaths of fabric. She babbled furiously about her drinking water. Each wing of the complex drew drinking, cooking, and bathing water from the central water tower into private cisterns via garden hoses. Breathing like a great dying beast, she swore to give five-year-old Hien a good whipping. She croaked that she had caught him with his pants down, his penis inserted into the garden hose feeding directly into the staff’s water supply. Peeing! Peeing!
No one knew, but once Hien discovered that his penis and the garden hose were a perfect fit, he had been using the same personal urinal for months. Hien escaped the lynching mob that day but didn’t leave our quarters for a week. Whenever he crossed the path of a staff member, he got a smack on the back of the head for the disgrace he had dealt. From then on, hoses were coiled and put away in a safe place.
For the length of our stay in Indonesia, eighteen months, we were quartered in a single fourteen-by-twenty-five-foot room. Our fishermen shared one of the two dormitories with other inmates. The food was bad. There was no privacy. People bickered. Quarrels often came to blows. The men lasted ten months and jumped on the first opportunity to leave. They wanted to go to America, but the paperwork took too long and was an uncertainty at best because none of them had relatives living Stateside. To a man, they elected to go to France. It was the last we ever saw of them.
During the first three months we shared a room with a Chinese couple from Hong Kong. They were nice and solicitous, giving us candies and toys they bought in town. Mom liked them immensely because they had daily town-passes and they grocery-shopped for her. They were particularly nice to Chi and Auntie Dung.
One night, with my parents’ permission, they took Chi and Dung into town for dinner and a movie. The evening’s real destination, their little surprise, followed the sanctioned part of the outing. They pedicabbed the girls to a massage parlor on the far, and seamier, side of town. It was a place I later visited with a big-brother-friend, an Indonesian soldier stationed at the dock compound; on his payday spree I drank sodas while he did his thing. Local patrons called this corner of the city the Perfumed Quarters. It was a rubble-tossed jungle of plywood huts running along a river of reeking sewage. Pavement and streetlamps hadn’t found purchase among the mountains of sundered concrete.
They ushered Chi and Dung into one of those lice hooches and gave them cold sodas. A couple of girls who worked there joined them for a chat. Neither Chi nor Dung spoke much Indonesian. Mr. Ho, the husband, commanded a smattering of Vietnamese and translated for the girls. While they were there, men came in and paired off with Indonesian girls who led their newfound boyfriends to the rooms in the back. The operation dawned on both Chi and Dung.
Mr. Ho whipped out a thick roll of bills. “You like money? You want to make lots of money?”
Chi and Dung nodded and shook their heads simultaneously. Food was barely sufficient at the compound, and no one had any money to buy as much as a new shirt or a pair of plastic slippers. Mom sold her earrings to the cooks to buy rice, eggs, and vegetables for the family, but besides these extra staples to line our stomachs, there was not a nickel to be had by anyone.
Smiling goodwill, Mrs. Ho, a slim, attractive woman in her midthirties, took the girls’ hands and urged them toward a rickety corridor of rooms with unevenly boarded walls leaking raucous laughter and moans. Mrs. Ho let them peek into the rooms to make certain there was no mistaking the terms of her proposition. She led them back to the waiting room, where Mr. Ho was talking with some Chinese-Indonesian men. Pulling a stack of bills out of her purse, she nudged it at them, then gestured at the men.
Grabbing Chi’s hand, Dung cried, “No! We want to go home!”
Dung and Chi fled outside and caught a pedicab home with the money Mom had given them. At the compound, they spilled the story to Mom and us boys—Huy, Tien, and me. I was thinking there was going to be a fist fight, but Mom didn’t seem all that angry about the whole thing. In fact, she didn’t want us to tell Dad. She just said we couldn’t trust the Hos anymore and reminded us that Mr. Ho outweighed Dad by forty pounds. It seemed odd to me that Mom didn’t want to have it out with the Hos. I vowed to Chi and Dung that us boys would exact vengeance and redeem the family’s honor. The Hos returned early in the morning and retreated to their corner of the room, sectioned off by bedsheets, and pretended nothing unusual had happened.
The next afternoon when the lunch bell rang, the Hos were going away at it, passionate and noisy behind their fabric walls. The whole family had always turned a deaf ear to their frequent husband-and-wife business. Since seven-year-old Tien was the most innocent looking, we had him spearhead the operation. We waited until the men of our group came by, as they usually did, to go with the family down to the kitchen for lunch.
Tien, trailed by Huy and me, marched into the room and pulled open the Hos’ curtains. Tien announced in his peeping voice, “Mr. and Mrs. Ho, it’s lunchtime! Do you want to come with us?”
Mrs. Ho was naked on her back atop the bed, her red panties shackling her knees. And Mr. Ho, equally bare, looked up from where he was busying himself, his head between her legs. Our fishermen got a good view Tien dropped the curtain and the men yanked us out of the room by our ears.
We followed this stunt by slipping a batch of live cockroaches under their blankets and trapping them inside the mosquito netting. Next were cat litter beneath their bed and food scraps in their clothes drawers to attract fire ants. They screamed and threatened, but they never caught us in the act, so we went unpunished. Our series of pranks lasted three days, until the Hos, with a little official bribing, finagled quarters in another wing.
Life in the compound was intolerably boring. Breakfast was a lump of bread and a cup of instant coffee, or milk-tea for the children. Lunch was rice and vegetables boiled with oily
onion water. Dinner was a fillet of fried fish, rice, and more boiled vegetables. Little variation. The morning was cool, the afternoon muggy, the evening alive with mosquitoes. Huy, Tien, and I picked up a hobby—burning anthills—until we inadvertently torched an ancient tree.
Besides the maintenance staff, most of the compound denizens liked us because our pranks gave them something to talk about. We picked up foster brothers. Tien’s favorite friend was Jatook, a guard who lived in town and often brought him candies. Huy’s big brother was a tall Indonesian lieutenant, an avid golfer who accidentally whacked Huy in the head with a driver. Wong, the Chinese giant, was my friend.
He was the gentlest lifer, a loner in his late forties. He towered a head and a half over everyone at the compound, but no one feared him. He was well-liked because he was soft-spoken, kind, and kept to himself. Wong had a broad, plain face, a wide nose, round cheeks, and a stone set mouth, hard and silent. He was a jade cutter. Eight to ten hours every day, seven days a week, he labored on the steps under the roof overhang just out of the sun and rain. Perching on a comically low stool, an animated gargoyle, he hunched his great shoulders over a grindstone mounted on a block of wood, shaping a shard of jade clamped between his vise fingers.
Shk-shk-shk-shk. The sound of him grinding in the courtyard outside our quarters became as natural to us as cricket song. Once, to end my pestering, he lent me a shaping stone and a drop of red jade and had me try. I lasted an hour. Wong spoke fluent Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. He often told me Chinese fables, which I committed to memory and retold to my brothers. My mother was fond of him because he gave estimates on the value of her jade bracelets. She hoped they might help us if we ever found ourselves in a tight spot in America.
“The nature of the stone is its will to remain stone. The stone’s will is strong. To shape it, your will must be stronger than the stone’s. To do this you must be the stone of stones.”
“A diamond?” I asked, and Wong tweaked my ear.
Wong was a permanent prison fixture, and white-bearded Mr. Ling, the longest resident and oldest lifer, said that all lifers cracked sooner or later. Wong had been there twelve years and every year he sent an appeal to whatever country he thought he belonged to. Every year he was rejected. So he polished jade for jewelers in town. The compound’s officials allowed him to work and took a cut of his earnings.
The day Wong cracked, he started drinking from morning until late afternoon. Wong went over his limit around sunset. Maybe another one of his appeals got rejected. Maybe someone in his family died. Maybe his big old heart just broke after all those years. Maybe the sunset pushed him over the edge. The orange hours were the toughest behind the walls because it was always hot and clammy and the latrine stank and there was nowhere to walk off that jittery energy in cooped-up legs. Inmates paced like overwound clocks. Wong’s alarm finally went off.
It was hard to tell why he cracked because no one but I, a snotnosed kid, really talked to him. Wong dwelt in a dark corner of the cavernous but windowless west hall, with its single row of rectangular air holes at the top, not large enough for an adult’s head. His cubbyhole of a decade was nine by six feet, curtained off with old bedsheets hanging on bailing wire and a modest folding screen.
All day, every day, the compound cronies, inmates and staff, convened for bingo. By the time the sun slipped horizontally through the air vents, the gamblers had puffed their cheap tobacco into a wheaty haze. The humid hotness was dense. Except for the caller croaking out numbers, the chips rattling in plastic jars, and the halfhearted curses of the players, the place was rather quiet. I was hanging around, hoping for a soda errand. They usually wanted cigarettes or sodas while they played.
Wong broke the hour with a wordless sound, a blast from the bullhorn of his throat. It was a groan, a scream, a cry, a screech, but it was the depth and the power of his rage that made it a howl. It was throaty and it was brittle. Something was breaking in him. I had never heard anything like it. A chill flushed through me. The hall reverberated, the echoes chasing each other back and forth and away. The cronies jumped, then froze, bingo chips pebbling the floor, as Wong came alive behind his cell of cotton sheets.
He tore up his corner, shredding his mattress, and with one sweep of his arm the shelves he had fashioned of salvaged bamboo exploded and all the fine stones he had polished and all the figurines he had cut shrapneled across the room. His fingers balled and formed a wild pair of hammers levered on his shoulders. Down went the hammer, the table shattered. Down went the hammer, the folding screen splintered. Down went the hammer, the chair collapsed. Wong tornadoed through his small world, letting loose the demon inside him. And the demon became Wong as the sham of his existence was reduced to rubble.
All the people to whom he was too shy to talk were there to witness his destruction, his shame, his hurt bare in the wreckage, fine stones ground to bits and howls that gave odd time to his fevered dance. They watched him exorcise their demon, the frustrated boil of confinement, the bleeding of hope. Wong’s wet red eyes mopped across me without recognition. I was afraid for him when the guards came. They beat and jumped on him, piling four deep, tearing off his shirt. Wong roared. He threw them aside like clothes. Out from the front building came officials and bureaucrats, brandishing sticks, beating Wong. The matadors converged on the bull, teased him, herded him into a tower, and locked him inside. His throat venting inhuman cries, Wong sledged himself against the door, but it did not give. On the strength of his fingertips, he clawed his way thirty feet up the brick wall of the hollow tower, right into the rafters. He punched through the roof and burst into the orange sunset. Half-naked in the curving light, he hurled tiles into the empty courtyard. The guards didn’t want to shoot Wong. Shaking their heads in pity, they stood in the breezeway out of the spray of tile fragments and murmured that this would all have to come out of Wong’s jade-earnings. The day was failing him. He had scalped the roof, nothing left to throw. He jumped. I wished we could go to America.
20
Fullcircle-Halflives
5 a.m. The night couldn’t have passed quickly enough. I want to be away from here. Away from Kim. I want to go north. I want to go to Hanoi and forget, but I need to pay homage to one more place in South Vietnam. I need to find Minh Luong Prison, perhaps even more than touring the rest of the country. Somehow, I have long thought of it as the end of my journey—as if by finding Minh Luong and returning to the exact spot where I had watched my father working the minefield, I will have come full circle. I spent the night mulling over my choices and nursing beers on the balcony. An hour before daybreak, I strap on my backpack and strike out for a brisk four-mile hike to the market, where a fleet of minivans shuttles people into Saigon hourly, sunrise to sunset. Hanoi must wait.
A wolf-faced man and his partner collect my two dollars and pack me into a minivan along with thirteen other people, including the driver. Two torturous hours later, they drop us at Ben Thanh Market in downtown Saigon. I take a motorbike taxi out to the main bus depot at the southern fringe of the city. It accommodates all the traffic to and from the Mekong Delta.
I trudge up and down the dusty, diesel-slicked lot the size of four football fields, inquiring for the next bus out to Rach Gia. The place is a hive of activity, sellers hawking food, last-minute gifts, and whatnots, porters moving cargo, travelers hurrying to their buses, motorbike-taxi drivers pestering for fares, and mechanics banging away, repairing buses. A constant stream of noisy, fuming vehicles moves through the gate in both directions. Most of the raw materials that sustain Saigon are channeled through three major bus depots. Farmers bring in produce and livestock from the countryside. Young men and women come to the City looking for work even as Saigon sends its manufactured and imported goods out to the provinces. The frenzy seethes with ant-like industry.
Busing in Vietnam is a freewheeling enterprise, somewhat akin to the stagecoaches of the old American West. Privately owned buses, driven by the owners and their rel
atives, go bumping from town to town hailing freight, livestock, and produce and picking up riders standing on the side of the road like hitchhikers. A stripped-down traveling show, they roar along, working every minute, shooting from village to village, laughing and cajoling a livelihood from the highway boredom. They haul on a skeleton crew of four—any more and there are too many mouths to feed, any less and they’re liable to be cheated by their customers. The driver is always and only the driver, keeping his eyes on the road and muttering prayers to the Buddha mounted on the dashboard. There couldn’t be a more serious lot of drivers in the world. These guys deal in life and death daily, their whole family riding on their performance, the bus their vehicle, the whole family’s savings and possibly their coffin on wheels. In my brief travels here, I’ve seen several dead buses, smashed, rolled belly-up, and disemboweled by salvagers.
I board the next bus out of town, trusting myself to its plastic deity. It is going to Chau Doc, then Rach Gia. Like most others, it is a Russian-made death trap, halfway into its own graveyard. I negotiate my way to the back of the bus, climbing over luggage, crates, and tin tanks of fishsauce. The bus has been gutted and crudely regaffed to double its passenger capacity, the thinly upholstered benches crammed so tight that even small Vietnamese have trouble sitting without knocking their knees. The floor is decked with wooden planks sporting gaps big enough to swallow a boot.
Combing the aisle checking passenger tickets, the bus driver arches an eyebrow at my accent: Viet-kieu, eh? Yes, I tell him. He tows me back to the front of the bus. Sit right here, then, the best seat in the house. No, not there, here right behind me. He steers me into the seat and whispers in my ear. You don’t want to sit back there. Too noisy. Sit here, good view for sightseeing and you can stretch your legs. He shows me where to put my legs, right beside his seat, inches from the stick shift. You’re the first Viet-kieu on our bus, he tells me excitedly, grinning around his cigarette, his teeth chewed up and stained like spent spark plugs. Why don’t you rent a car instead? Too expensive, I tell him, this is more fun anyway. He looks at me incredulously then starts mining me for information about the bus business in America.
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