Behind the Moon (18 page)

‘I’m strong, and he can’t keep this up forever,’ Linh said. ‘He’ll get the message sooner or later. He’s not a stupid boy.’

‘Don’t you see? He’s not a boy at all. He’s a man, and he’s obsessed with you. How long are you going to dodge his phone calls and emails? How long can you barricade yourself in this apartment and not go out except for work, just in case he shows up? How long are you going to let him victimise you?’

Her mother did not answer. She gulped down her pills, rinsed her glass out and set it on the drying rack.

‘God, why are you so damned Vietnamese? I’ve heard you and Ong Ngoai quoting
Kieu
, for all the good it does you. “How sorrowful is woman’s lot . . . We all partake of woe, our common fate.” Well fuck that. You’re not in Vietnam anymore. You don’t have to be a victim just because you’re a woman.’

Linh sat down at the little kitchen table. She dragged her hands through her hair, then dropped her head onto her arms, too tired to keep up the pretence of strength in front of her daughter.

‘Mum, please let me help you,’ Tien pleaded. ‘Let me do something for you.’

‘How can you help me when all you show is disrespect?’ Linh squeezed her eyes shut. If she was hard on her daughter, she was equally unforgiving with herself. She did not believe she deserved her daughter’s respect even though she demanded it. Tien was right. She was too sexually needy. She wanted to feel the comfort of a man’s weight on her. She wanted to feel alive and loved once more. It seemed as if it was only yesterday that she had been young and so much loved by Tien’s father. Then she blinked and suddenly her bones ached on wintry days and she had to dye her hair. Time streaked by in her youth, then dragged out towards long, lonely old age. And though Tien might despise her, though she might despise herself, she was helpless against her desire to be loved and to make love once again. She buried her face in her arms and began to cry.

The old familiar guilt welled up in Tien. She sighed and sat down beside her mother. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to make things right.’

She put her arms around her mother and gave her a quick awkward hug. ‘I don’t want to fight with you any more, Mum. Let me help you. Let me take care of you.’

Tien rose up from the table and found some tissues in her handbag. Hesitantly, she lifted her mother’s chin and began to blot away the tears. Linh was motionless under her touch. She did not jerk away. Tien took out a hairbrush and tugged it gently through her mother’s hair.

‘This feels strange,’ Linh said after a while.

‘Am I pulling too hard?’ Tien asked anxiously.

‘No. But I feel like I should be doing this for you. In fact, I used to when you were a toddler. When we were still in Vietnam, you stayed with Ong Ngoai and Uncle Duong and Auntie Ai-Van in Cholon. I had to go out to work but, whenever I came home, I would comb your hair. I sat on a stool and you stood wriggling impatiently between my knees. I dragged a fine-toothed comb through your curls to check for nits and afterwards I would give you a dry wash. I lathered your hair carefully, then I rinsed away the shampoo with a pot of water. Sometimes the water got into your ears, so I had to dry them out for you. Then I would take an ear scoop to clean out the wax from your ears.’

‘The GP would have a fit,’ Tien observed. ‘“Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear,” she always said.’

‘You loved me doing it when you were little.’

‘I don’t remember any of it,’ Tien said. She put down the hairbrush and looked at her mother. ‘I don’t remember anything about you before that day old Mrs Yipsoon broke her hip and you showed up and punished me. When we were talking just now, I guess you were right. I don’t know much about you, but I’d like to.’

The Tale of Linh I

Spring feelings quivered hearts, spring wine turned heads.

A happy day is shorter than a span.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Ho Ly-Linh was married at the age of sixteen and abandoned a year later. Her grandmother was responsible for this.

When Linh was fifteen Grandmother took her north to meet the fourth son of a wealthy Chinese rice merchant. Linh would not normally have been acceptable even as a fourth son’s wife, for she was not really a Hoa: a pure-blooded Chinese. Her father was half-Hoa, halfViet, and her mother was pure Viet. But in 1956, when Linh was two years old, President Diem had decided to Vietnamise the Chinese. He introduced legislation forcing the Hoa to adopt Vietnamese citizenship or lose their businesses. The Tang family, arrogant in their unbroken heritage of Chineseness, disdained the Viet and refused to integrate. They did, however, make the concession of Vietnamising their name to Thanh, hiring Vietnamese sleeping partners in their business, and marrying their lesser sons to Vietnamese women.

Thanh Lam, whom Linh referred to respectfully as Ong Chong—Mr Husband—was forced into the marriage. Always sensitive to his less privileged position as the fourth son, Lam felt the indignity of marrying a Vietnamese. None of his three elder brothers had been forced to accept Viet wives; their father had sent for pureblooded Chinese girls from the ancestral village in China. Lam threw a tantrum, got blind drunk in the local brothel and staggered back to submit resentfully to his father’s will. What else could he do, in his position of youngest son, wholly dependent on his father’s ferocious goodwill?

At the height of the Tet offensive in 1968, the relatives were informed of the betrothal. Gifts were exchanged, then husband and wife met for the second time at the Chinese ceremony a few months later. Lam was aggrieved by his bride’s ordinary looks; he felt he deserved something more, for he was an extraordinarily handsome young man. Bridal photos showed a glowering bridegroom with glossy black hair oiled into an Elvis pompadour, lower lip petulantly thrust out, while a plain-faced, apprehensive bride drowned in a froth of white silk tulle, for the European colonisation of Asia had bred in the breasts of its women an unremitting love affair with Western bridal clothes.

Bride and groom returned to Cholon, the Chinese twin city of Saigon, to live. Lam soon discovered that, like New York, Saigon—a mere five kilometres from his home in Cholon, the distance negligible on the old
xe lam
buses or the Honda scooters that coughed and spluttered through the thronging streets—was a city that never slept. The American war, the presence of Allied soldiers partying the night away on salaries of four or five hundred US dollars a month, imbued the city with a dazzling, neon-lit mardi-gras atmosphere.

He quickly became familiar with nightclubs where American rock ’n’ roll screamed out of open doors and windows while dancers shuddered in frenzied joy within. He frequented various bars where bar-girls or prostitutes slid onto rickety stools next to him and sad songs drifted into dark corners. At 3 am, he staggered out of brothels, reeking of sex and cigarette smoke. He sniffed the fragrant odour of noodles frying over the charcoal braziers of roadside stalls, and threw up his dinner into the open gutter.

Unsurprisingly, he failed at the rice business he tried to set up. In Cholon, most people woke around five. Certainly by six o’clock Chinese merchants would be gathered in roadside stalls and coffee-houses, eating breakfast and exchanging the latest financial news and stock prices. Complex transactions worth millions of piastres were negotiated as they chomped on dumplings and slurped up noodles and soup. By the time Lam, nattily dressed and ready to be plied with potent cups of
café phin
and a bowl of
pho
, wandered out into the streets at midday, even the hawkers would be packing up their wares, ready to leave, while the merchants and other businessmen were nowhere to be seen. He was soon bankrupt. He sold the house that his father had given him as a wedding present, pocketed the money and moved into a dilapidated room at the end of a tiny, T-shaped alley near the Cholon Moi market. He was tired of working. He depended on his wife to support them.

In their dark little room, Linh made paper boxes and Chinese calendars which she sold once a month at the market. She sat on the low bed each night, wrapped the mosquito net around her and deftly folded sheets of paper and cardboard by the dim light of a single overhead bulb which yellowed during the frequent power fluctuations. In the early mornings, she hoisted a bamboo pole over her shoulders, filled the two big baskets on either end with
banh giay
and
banh chung
and wandered through the maze of alleys in Cholon to sell the glutinous rice puddings wrapped in bamboo leaves. She made the
banh
giay
and
banh chung
in the afternoons, cooking them on a communal stove in the alley. On sunny afternoons, when the coffin lid of sky above the alley was filmed with smog tangling with the overhead electrical wires, children scattered around her, chasing each other, playing football, bouncing and kicking the brightly coloured feathers of shuttlecocks with skilled brown feet. Sometimes the boys helped her to cleave firewood to feed the stove while the girls learned how to wrap the rice dumplings.

Ten months after the marriage, Linh gave birth to a sickly girl and named her Thi-Lan. The baby would not stop crying. Lam was constantly irritated. On their first wedding anniversary, Lam packed his bags and told Linh that he was migrating to Hong Kong with his current Hoa mistress, whom he had decided to take as his second wife. There was no need for a divorce, he told Linh, for they had only gone through the Buddhist ceremony; their marriage had never been legally registered with the authorities.

‘Ong Chong, how can you leave? What about little Lan?’ she pleaded.

He snorted and replied: ‘A hundred daughters aren’t worth a single testicle.’

‘Don’t go,’ she begged him. ‘I will be a better wife to you starting today. Next time I will have a son.’

‘Today?’ he spat contemptuously. ‘Today you become more Vietnamese. Tomorrow even more.’ It was, in his Chinese eyes, an insult.

The baby Lan woke from her sleep and kicked at the mosquito net fretfully. She began to wail. Lam sucked his teeth in annoyance and clipped out of the small room into the alley, two brown suitcases swinging at the ends of his arms in measured rhythm like counterpointed metronomes.

‘Ong Chong!’ Linh cried from the doorway. Lam hesitated, turned around, and hefted up one suitcase in final farewell before proceeding down the street.

In her panic, Linh picked up the baby, hugged the whimpering child into the curve of her body as she curled up on the mattress and cried. She would never completely rid herself of the conviction that she was somehow to blame. If only she had been a better wife—better with money, better in bed, simply better—her husband would not have left her. She did not recognise that what she also felt was rage, for throughout her life she had not had many opportunities to vent her anger. She dragged herself up and peered into a small black-spotted mirror. She poured cold tea onto a towel and dabbed the compress to her swollen eyes. She said to daughter, ‘You must never cry or your eyes will puff up and you will have piggy Chinese eyes like Thanh Lam.’

Linh told herself that Thanh Lam was nothing to her, merely a cell that spawned her child and a name that clung to her like sticky rice until she could wipe it off her fingers. She managed to look after the child for three months, then she woke one morning to find that she had rolled on top of the baby. Horrified, she put her fingers over Lan’s mouth, but there was no breath and no sound when she shook the child. She knew from that moment on that suffering was her lot in life because she had killed her daughter.

Dry-eyed, she laid the dead child on a bamboo mat and placed a chopstick between lips still as pink as a camellia bud. She took one of Lan’s tiny singlets and waved it over the corpse, calling for her daughter’s soul to return to the body. Then she bathed the corpse, combed the straggly baby curls, dusted the body lightly with talcum powder, put her nose to her daughter’s neck and sniffed deeply. How she loved the smell of her baby’s skin. She took off her gold wedding ring and placed it carefully into Lan’s mouth, together with a handful of cold rice.

She made a sturdy cardboard box, wrapped Lan in a white nappy and embraced her daughter one last time before laying her in the box. She fixed the lid over the box and secured it tightly. Then she caught a bus out to the countryside and buried the cardboard coffin under the dyke of a drained rice field. She went back to her little room in the alley, tied a black scarf around her head, piled her belongings onto a borrowed handcart and wheeled it down the winding streets to her father’s house.

The Ho family lived on the top floor of a ricketylooking three-storey terrace which housed their printing firm on the ground floor. Mr Ho had three sons by his first wife, a Hoa woman who had died of dysentery when her youngest son had just been weaned. He then married a Viet woman who gave birth to Ly-Linh. Mr Ho’s eldest son had been sent to Paris to study medicine, but Duyen returned to Vietnam infected with nationalist ideas of anticolonialism. He had joined up with General Giap’s army to fight the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French were defeated, Duyen was killed, and Mr Ho forbade his younger sons, Duong and Duc, to think about the war. Later, when the American war escalated and the South Vietnamese forces began recruiting young men, Mr Ho took a meat cleaver and hacked off his two sons’ index fingers so that they would be unable to pull the trigger on a rifle.

Mr Ho married his two remaining sons to Viet women and set them to work in his printing shop, which churned out volumes of Vietnamese literature: the ‘SelfStrength’ novelists of the 1930s; medieval Nom poems; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century luminaries of Vietnamese literature—Doan Thi Diem, Nguyen Gia Thieu, Nguyen Cong Tru; the cheeky proto-feminist verses of Ho Xuan Huong; and, of course, Nguyen Du’s classic love story,
The Tale of Kieu
, large sections of which Mr Ho taught his daughter to recite by heart.

When Linh was a little girl, he would haul her onto his lap before bedtime, sniff her clean hair and assure her lovingly: ‘Clouds could not shape the graceful fall of her hair and snow was no match for her complexion. The curve of her brows was like the dreamy line of mountains in the spring. A smile from her could rock empires and citadels. That is you,
con gai
, my lovely daughter.’

When Linh returned to her father’s house, she found there was no room for her. Already crammed onto that third floor were her father, her mother, her brothers Duong and Duc, their wives, two daughters and one son—nine people in all. They welcomed Linh warmly, expressed shock and outrage at Thanh Lam’s treatment of his family, grieved loudly at Lan’s death (Linh did not explain how she had accidentally smothered the baby), heaped colourful curses on Lam’s head, and offered her a bamboo mat in the kitchen— the only unoccupied space in that flat.

Whenever Mr Ho looked at his only daughter, guilt nagged at him because he had approved the useless Thanh Lam as her husband when his mother had insisted on marrying Linh off. How could he have known that an alliance with so wealthy a Chinese family could end in such disaster for his daughter? Late at night, when Linh curled like a comma on her bamboo mat, Mr Ho would shuffle to the kitchen and squat beside his daughter. He cupped his palm and his long elegant fingers slowly stroked the air above her black hair like blessing. He wanted to keep her safe and happy, but he was no longer sure he could even keep her fed. Wartime inflation had eroded his savings and his printing presses ceased their restless groanings, for who wanted to read long-dead poets in these years of war when American pop songs pounded across the airwaves and the young men felt that the next Tet would usher in a golden age of unbridled capitalist freedom or the conflagration of communistic apocalypse (nobody quite knew which)? In the end, he decided to ask Mr Thieu for advice about what should be done with Linh.

The second floor of the terrace had long ago been sold to a school teacher who conducted French and English classes. Each day a slow dirge of conjugated verbs wafted up to the third floor, so that the Ho family ate their lunch to the mournful chant of: ‘
Je veux le paix
,
tu veux le paix
,
il veut le paix
,
nous voulons le paix
,
vous
voulez le paix
,
ils veulent le paix
.’ In the early evenings, the francophile Mr Ho would make his way down to the second floor to join Mr Thieu—Mr Professor, they called him—in a cup of
café phin
. The two men browsed the dark wood shelves of the schoolroom and picked out tattered copies of French poetry to read aloud to each other.

Mr Professor had lost four sons in battle—first in the French, and then the American war. He was half proud of his anguish, half envious of Mr Ho’s loving cowardice, which kept Duong and Duc maimed but alive. Lately, Mr Professor had taken to reciting with bitter humour André Chénier’s ‘When the sombre slaughterhouse opens its maws of death to a bleating sheep’. Slurping up the dregs of his coffee, he removed his wire-rimmed spectacles, wiped them carefully, waggled them at Mr Ho, and intoned in French:

‘Haaargh.’ Unbearably moved by his friend’s late-won wisdom and the exquisite web of Mr Professor’s sorrow, Mr Ho cleared his throat and projected his spit missile over the crumbling balcony onto the unsuspecting crowd that swirled in the street below.

Mr Thieu inclined his head slowly in acknowledgement of this expression of sympathy. ‘
Oui
,’ he sighed. ‘
Trop tard
. Always too late.’