I think whatever Vietnamese—Northerners, Southerners, or Vietkieu—feel about this man and his ideologies, they respect him as all the underdog countries of the world do. For here was a man of inconsequential beginnings who crept through the land of the white man as a menial laborer and returned to wrestle his homeland from empires. Founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1946 until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cuong to a fiercely nationalistic scholar-official of humble means. He studied in Hue at the Quoc Hoc Secondary School, then migrated south to work as a teacher in Phan Thiet, my hometown, the very village where my father, eking out a living as a teacher, met my mother. At the age of twenty-one, Ho signed on to a French ship as a cook’s apprentice, the first step of what would become a thirty-year journey that would take him to North America, Africa, and Europe. He settled in London, then Paris, earning a living as a gardener, snow sweeper, waiter, photo finisher, and mastered several languages, including English, French, German, and Mandarin. It was his tenure in the racially prejudiced Western world that led Ho to examine his roots and nurture his sense of patriotism.
How many “Yes, sir!” “Oui, oui, Monsieur!” “Yes, sahib!” did he utter, head bowed submissively? How many times did he long to stroll the cobbled byways of Paris and the marbled corridors of London as an equal of any Frenchman, any Englishman? How often did he gaze upon a white woman and wish for the pleasure of her company, the faintest possibility of her caress? Maybe patriotism has always been at the core of him. Maybe not. But I know; I’ve felt the patriotic urge. Walking in shoes vaguely similar to his, I know this deep-seated fire—this yearning for self-worth—fueled by the feelings of an unadoptable outsider, is nearly irresistible.
He changed his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc—Nguyen the Patriot—and began to write and debate the issue of Indochina’s independence from France. At the green age of twenty-nine, he—an Indochinese laborer, a manservant—tried, without success, to present an independence plan for Vietnam to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. The following year, disillusioned with Western intentions, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party. The Communist Internationals summoned him to Moscow for training in 1923 and later sent him to Guangzhou (Canton) to found the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam, a stepping-stone for the later Indochinese Communist Party. The next decade and a half he shuttled back and forth between the U.S.S.R. and China, once landing in a Hong Kong jail.
At the ripe age of fifty-one, he finally returned, in 1941, to his homeland to help found the Viet Minh Front to extricate Vietnam from the yokes of French colonialism and Japanese occupation. He was arrested and imprisoned for a year, by the anti-Communist Nationalist Chinese. During its insurgency, his Viet Minh received funding and arms from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). Immediately after the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh unleashed an uprising called Cach Mang Thang Tam—the August Revolution. On September 2, 1945, at a rally in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, Uncle Ho, with OSS agents at his side, declared Vietnam’s independence, reading a constitution he drafted that borrowed liberally from the American Declaration of Independence.
Uncle Ho died unmarried and without children. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he was in love with the loveliest of all females: Vietnam. They say Vietnam is like a beautiful woman wooed first by the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the Americans. The men always say this with undisguised pride—not anger or outrage—but pride, followed by a glint of zealousness when they say Vietnam is now ours. Ours. Though it is clear to me, ours doesn’t include Viet-kieu.
Ours is those who believe in Uncle Ho. Those who believe in the thousands of photos of Uncle Ho preserved in museums throughout the country. His visage is old but strong and benevolent. Uncle Ho, the peasant irrigating rice paddies by hand. Uncle Ho, the teacher chalking history on the blackboard for his good students. Uncle Ho, the poet painting Chinese calligraphy. Uncle Ho, the worker shaping the earth with a shovel. Uncle Ho, the protector standing before children. Uncle Ho, your uncle and mine.
An odd, disorienting feeling tickles me as I study his gaunt face, thirty years preserved. I’d first seen that face over two decades ago, the day when Saigon fell. I remember peeping out of steel window shutters and seeing tanks and trucks growling through the street, Uncle Ho’s victorious, grinning face emblazoned on their sides. I’d seen him on stamps, on the new currency of a unified Vietnam. And I had seen him smiling, looking on from the prison wall where they executed my fellow prisoners. I remember him grinning in my nightmares.
One of the four Imperial guards, supposedly as stoic and fearsome as a sphinx, shifts his weight, struggling mightily to stifle a yawn. The spell is broken. We shuffle out. The Australian boy pesters his father for another go around the mummy.
Down by the old section of Hanoi where the houses are nearing a century, a fifteen-year-old girl sitting on the sidewalk asks me if I’d like to buy a snack: rice dumpling with sugarcane syrup. Next to her are two baskets. Her feet are tucked beneath her at awkward angles. She is sitting with a friend, a twenty-something girl with two baskets of papayas, the smaller, green northern breed. They are thin, barefoot peasants from the countryside. I buy rice dumplings and a papaya on the condition that they help me eat the refreshments. Munching and chatting, we sit on the sidewalk, motorbikes sputtering in the narrow street, pedestrians walking around us.
Rice-girl wants to know how much an airplane ticket to America costs. A lot, I say, I had to save for a long time.
“A hundred American dollars,” Papaya-girl ventures, apparently noting what she considers to be an astronomical sum. I nod vaguely, having no heart for the truth.
“Wow. Oh, my God. Can you imagine that? It would take us five years to save that much,” murmurs Rice-girl. Her friend nods at the impossibility of saving such a sum.
“You are good-looking,” Rice-girl says to me, changing the topic.
“Me? No, I am ugly. I have been traveling very long so I look like a vagrant. No haircut, no shave.”
“No,” she explains, “you look good: you have nice clothes.”
“Ah, you mean my old jeans and T-shirt?”
“That’s a nice T-shirt. You can’t buy it here.”
“This orange-brown color?”
“No, that’s a hugging T-shirt. There’s no seam on the side. It’s one whole tubular piece of cloth and it’s pure cotton.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t noticed. “You are very pretty.”
“Silly man,” chides Papaya-girl. “We’re not pretty. We’re just peasant girls, selling papaya and rice cakes.”
“What’s your name?” asks Rice-girl, clearly relishing a slice of papaya.
“Pham Xuan An.”
“That’s a nice name,” says Papaya-girl, her friend nodding in agreement. “Xuan An—peaceful spring—that’s pretty.”
“It’s girlish. My mother’s idea. What’s your name?”
“Mine is not so pretty,” Rice-girl admits without shame, helping herself to more papaya. “My family is poor and my parents never went to school.”
“Mine isn’t pretty either,” Papaya-girl admits.
“A name is just a name,” I reassure them.
“Yes, but I don’t have a real one. My parents call me Third Daughter.”
“That’s just a title, a nickname. Don’t you have a real name?”
“No, my parents can’t read or write. Don’t you know it’s shameful—bad luck—to give your children fancy names when you know they will live poor lives? How would it look if a farmer had a prettier name than a prince?”
They are from a village thirty miles outside of Hanoi. They walk to the highway and ride a three-wheeled Tuk-tuk to Hanoi four days a week. Rice-girl makes her own rice dumplings and Papaya-girl picks her fruit from the family orchard. Neither has enough merchandise for a stall at the market or makes enough to pay for a p
ermit to sell on the street, so they go door-to-door.
A hubbub stirs the crowd at the other end of the street. The girls perk up, swiveling about like startled hares. Hastily, they pick up their plates and stools.
“Farewell, Big Brother. Thanks for talking with us. The cops are coming, we must go or they’ll confiscate our baskets,” Papaya-girl says, shouldering her staff, the pair of baskets tottering on either end like a balancing scale.
They bow and hurry away. Rice-girl is limping severely, walking on the outer edge of her deformed left foot. It is only noon. Hanoi is big.
No-name is a ten-year-old street boy. A deaf-mute who spends all of his time hanging around the foreign-tourist district. He befriends the tourists and tails them around town. His tourist friends don’t know where he lives. No one on the streets seems to know anything about him. I could only trace his lineage as far back as a month before I met him. A German couple, on a brief three-day tour of Hanoi, had befriended him. They introduced him to a French girl who, before her departure, acquainted the boy with Steve, an Aussie. Steve took the boy to dinner with a group of tourists and introduced him as No-name. The name stuck. Steve bunked in the same dormitory as William. When Steve left on a train to Saigon, he entrusted a map of Hanoi and No-name into the care of William, who wanted desperately to know more about the wordless boy. So I came into the picture, the next foster brother.
No-name’s gift is a room-splitting grin, his curse a continually runny nose which he drags on the sleeve of his sweater. He is the magic of the streets. You could be walking, shopping, dining anywhere within the ten city blocks of his stomping grounds, and, suddenly, he materializes out of nowhere walking beside you, standing at your elbow, or making faces at you through restaurant windows. He moves with you as though not a single beat has passed since you were last together. But he is no Oliver Twist who picks your pocket. He is much more dangerous. He steals your heart, and when you leave, your heart breaks as roundly as his.
I find myself lingering in Hanoi because of him. When I tour the city on my bicycle, he hops on the rear bike rack for a ride, laughing his mute laugh: Ackackackack ack ack! I carry him, my silly monkey, my little brother. We point to sights we know nothing about and smile at each other. Then he’s off to some other part of his domain. Perhaps to visit another tourist. Perhaps to go home—wherever he lives.
He is a soloist, a pariah among the children in the area. A scrappy bright-eyed boy, the runt of the litter. Kids are cruel as only kids can be, and No-name always seems to be ducking from the pranks of one tormentor to the blows of another. They resent his easy camaraderie with the fair-skinned foreigners. These kids are decently dressed, fleshed out, and scrubbed clean, the stamp of children with homes and family. No-name is somewhere along the side, on the edge. He bears the earmark of a child relinquished into the care of a lone grandmother or a kind but poor aunt.
I zealously nurture a morning coffee habit and No-name often pays me a visit during my grumpiest hour. An orange juice for him. An espresso for me. Toast, butter, and cheese all around. He only lets me treat him half of the time. He pays his share with a greasy fist of dime-bills. The waitresses used to shoo him out, but once seven tourists, with me as their translator, assured the owner that if she ever mistreated No-name, we would never eat at her café again. Other tourists would hear about her cruelty. These businesses rely heavily on tourists’ word of mouth and so she took the message to heart. Now, every other dawn, No-name sits next to me, contemplating the dust universe in the sunbeam angling through the window while I read the newspapers.
One morning, he signs me a question in his personal language. He doesn’t read or write. Hands out, face turning about, looking; fingers touching hair, hands far apart; index finger to the sun; hands about knees, describing a garment: Where’s sun-bright long-hair girl? I shake my head, fingers walking away. Gone, gone, I say, and he turns from me. I see tears rimming his eyes. He burrows his head into his folded arms on the table. When the waitress comes with his juice, he flees into the street, his breakfast untouched.
I know that when I go, I will leave as silently as Jen did. One morning he will come and I won’t be there with my paper and my espresso. And some morning, somewhere a world away, I will look at the sun angling through a window and I will think of a boy called No-name.
30
Silence-Years
“We’re gonna rumble tonight,” Cu-Den told me after school at his house.
1985. A typical day. We were juniors in high school. Cu-Den, Manh, and I were digging around the refrigerator for leftovers. We were wearing shoes in Cu-Den’s house because his mom wasn’t home. When she was, we bowed, left our shoes at the door, and crept meekly around her house, a couple of acolytes new to the monastery. Usually, we had the run of Cu-Den’s low-rent duplex because his mom and his older brother were at work. His brother paid the bills while his mother held down two jobs so she could bribe their father out of the Communist labor camp and bring him to the States.
“Who now?” I asked.
“The fucking Mexican cholos, man,” said Manh, the craziest of the bunch, a natural athlete, lean and muscular but a bit on the short side, sporting the stereotypical coconut-bowl haircut. He had given up on hair spray, nothing could give life to his black mop.
“Again?” There were three major groups at school, white, Mexican, and Vietnamese. Each group claimed a different wing of the school. Fights broke out regularly.
“Yeah,” Cu-Den said. “The rest of the gang is gonna meet us here. Six on six.”
“What the fuck for?”
Manh cracked up laughing. “The cholos got blamed for the fucking gym job!”
A couple of nights earlier, Cu-Den and I had been watching TV when Manh exploded through the back door yelling, “Turn off the light! Turn off the fucking lights!”
The gang stormed in after him, huffing and puffing, sweating. All scraped up. They had jumped the backyard fence, which rimmed the school’s soccer field. It was a six-foot chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire.
“Hide these! The cops are coming!” Lee barreled through the door, a huge duffel bag on his lineman’s shoulder. Tong and Thang trailed in, carrying similar loads.
We ran to the back-bedroom window Lights flooded the school gym and the basketball courts. Police cars everywhere, spinning redblue. Cops combed the field with their flashlights, walking the length of it and peeping into the fifty houses or so surrounding the school. We were lucky they didn’t have dogs.
In the living room, Manh was beside himself, swaggering like a real bad boy. “We broke into the gym!”
“Got everything, man!” Lee exclaimed, twirling a crowbar like a baton. He was probably the biggest Vietnamese in America. Big, blindingly fast, and, in a fight, real mean. We called him The Thing and we never “rumbled” without him.
“Shiiiiiiit! You should have seen Lee, man,” babbled Manh, grinning ear to ear. “Me and Thang were like pulling on the fucking bar forever and the damn door wouldn’t even open a crack. Lee came up and went … gggrrrrrrrGGGGRRRAAHH!! … and—KRACK! Busted door, yeah. He ripped that thing off the fucking hinges!”
“It was totally cool!” Tong shouted, pumping his arm, gyrating his touchdown dance, a skinny, floppy marionette. “Man, you guys should have seen it.”
“We cleaned the fucking place out,” bragged Thang, the only one with enough facial hair for a mustache, which he fondled continually like a real Confucius. “All the best stuff!”
“WoooooooooooHoooooooo!”
“We’re RICH!”
“YeeeeeeHaaaw!”
The gang had gone ahead with their plan when Cu-Den and I bowed out. They knew we were hoping to go to college and they didn’t hold our “chickening out” against us. We were cool about things like that. They pulled the job because they needed the stuff. The adrenaline was good too, but at the bottom of it was the fact that any of us was lucky to have ten bucks in our pocket on any day.
Cu-D
en and I gathered round to take a peek at their loot.
Socks, tennis balls, basketballs.
Cu-Den banged us a skillet of scrambled eggs, fried Spam, and steamed rice. It was all we could rake out of Cu-Den’s sorriest-looking fridge on the planet. The thing was loaded with relish, horseradish, salad dressing, teriyaki sauce, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, and not a damn thing to slather the condiment galore on. We doused Cu-Den’s special rice with fishsauce and chili paste and gobbled it up. We were going to need full stomachs to fight the Mexican homeboys who were a lot tougher than the redneck football players.
“When?” I asked Cu-Den.
“Ten tonight, behind the church.”
“After work,” Manh asserted.
We played tennis for the school, but we had to cut practice to make enough money to officially join the team. With the school’s fiscal problems, athletes had to pay for their own uniforms, physical checkups, and “team fees.” When the season started and it looked like the school couldn’t field a team, the principal and the tennis coach worked out a deal for the squad, which happened to be ninety-five percent Vietnamese American. Manh, Cu-Den, and I worked off a part of our fees by doing janitorial work in the classrooms after school. We still couldn’t come up with the rest of the cash. Jobs, even flipping burgers, were scarce in our neighborhood. Too many poor immigrants. Manh’s uncle owned an office-cleaning business. We were all underage, but his uncle said he could give us fifteen dollars each for four hours, if we promised not to “lift” anything on the job. Bloody damn generous, actually. Glad for the work, we cut practice and school to work for him whenever he could use us.
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