Behind the Moon (21 page)

Linh looked sadly at her daughter. ‘Why are you so anti-Vietnamese?’

‘I’m not,’ Tien said impatiently. ‘But I don’t believe in being a downtrodden victimised Vietnamese woman either. This isn’t the time or the land of
Kieu
, you know.’

‘You’re not a victimised Vietnamese woman? Why do you let Stan walk all over you then?’ Linh hurried on before her daughter could interrupt. ‘Anyway, you don’t know anything about Vietnamese women, Tien. We’re not victims. We’re fighters. Like the Trung sisters. Did you know that in 40AD Trung Trac and Trung Nhi led twelve other women generals against the Chinese? The Trung sisters were pregnant but they still defeated the Chinese in battle at the Red River Delta. That’s the kind of people you come from.’

‘Ancient history, Mum. What’s it got to do with now?’

‘You’re so Australian,’ Linh complained. ‘Australians are always moving on, always living in the present. Meanwhile the rest of the world walks hand in hand with the past, but you can’t understand other people’s grief and pain.’

‘We may live in the present but at least we’re living for the future,’ Tien retorted.

Linh kept silent. She wouldn’t argue with her daughter. She did not think their relationship was strong enough to withstand prolonged disagreement.

‘Stan and I will make a deal with you,’ Tien said one Sunday afternoon when she and her fiancé dropped by the Flemington apartment. ‘We’ve talked it over and Stan is willing to drop his lawsuit against Gillian if you will protect yourself by applying for an AVO against Gibbo.’

‘Tien, you can’t be serious! How can you bargain like that with people’s lives?’

‘Your safety and well-being are more important to me, Auntie,’ Stan said smugly. ‘You must let us help you.’ He placed his hand on Linh’s shoulder and squeezed it, smiling conspiratorially at Tien. She smiled back and looked expectantly at her mother.

How things had changed, Linh thought. In the old days, the young would have looked to her for advice. She herself would have sought advice from her father. These days, her father dozed in his armchair by the window and barricaded himself behind books, while her daughter and this young man regarded their elders with impatience. They insisted on holding up the mirror of assimilated youth to demonstrate to their parents and elders a first-generation migrant helplessness and ineptitude. Don’t speak; just listen to us, their attitude conveyed. Your old ways and beliefs don’t count; things are different here.

‘So we’re agreed then?’ Stan demanded. ‘We’ll file a police report and take Gibbo to court.’

‘The poor Gibsons,’ Linh said. But she agreed.

If Linh had had a better relationship with her daughter, she would not have felt the need to barter for her love. If Tien had chosen to mend her relationship with her mother earlier, Linh would not have clutched this new-found intimacy quite so desperately, willing to do whatever it took to maintain the link, willing to unite against a perceived external threat: Gibbo.

They went to the police station together: Linh, the victimised Vietnamese refugee; Tien, her triumphant competent daughter who believed that at last she could demonstrate
hieu thao
to the family (for as Australian as she claimed to be, she found she could not yank out her need for her family’s approval); and Stanley, who, in a state of barely repressed excitement at this domestic drama, also did his duty as a future son-in-law and flicked Gibbo off like an irritating fly.

It was difficult to calibrate your maternal expectations in a different cultural milieu; to determine what was and was not reasonable. Linh had been seduced by the idea of inter-generational friendship. She leafed through women’s magazines, watched Mother’s Day ads on TV and listened to young Anglo women in their twenties talking about how their mothers were their best friends. In a culture where there was no automatic respect and deference towards the elderly, adult children met their parents on equal ground. The rudeness and impatience could be heart-stumbling, but the loss of authority was offset by the lure of intimacy. Equality held out the possibility of friendship with your children.

Linh thought she was working towards this point with her daughter. She would be the first to admit that she had made mistakes when Tien was a child. Perhaps she had been too distant and strict in her drive towards success. She had arrived in Australia with numbed emotions and she had had nothing to give Tien in those early years. But she was redeeming herself as a mother now. Wasn’t this why she had, in the end, given in to Tien and Stan and applied for the AVO? She had consolidated her relationship with Tien by destroying the Gibsons.

And her reward? Glowing words of praise from Tien and Stan at their wedding reception. A tight hug from Tien as she whispered, ‘I love you, Mum’, and the glib assurance from Stan: ‘We’ll always take care of you.’ Then the wedding was over. Tien and Stan departed for their honeymoon and disappeared from her life. They went to San Francisco so that Stan could pursue his postgraduate medical studies at the UCSF School of Medicine. They had barged in, solved the problem for poor victimised Linh, and walked off dusting their hands with satisfaction. Now all she had to look forward to was a weekly phone call from Tien, and they simply hadn’t had enough time to build the kind of relationship whereby intimacy could be continued via long-distance phone lines. They expected so much each time the phone rang, but their conversation was stilted and they sounded like strangers to each other. Each hung up feeling frustrated that there was so little sense of connection to the other.

In Linh’s loneliness, there was plenty of time to reflect on and regret what she had done. She thought about Tien and Stan, and while she told herself to be grateful for their concern, she wondered how life could have failed these children—for they were still children to her—to the extent that even in the midst of their success, they needed something like this, someone to crush, simply to make them feel better about themselves.

Still, it was done. She could not unspin the world on its axis and rewind her life. She hardened her heart and told herself that she didn’t care; they would all have to live with it. Then, one afternoon, she received a letter from Bob, and she broke down and wept.

Linh,

I’ve never asked anything from you before, or from anyone
else for that matter. It’s hard for me to do it even now. It
really goes against the grain, especially since I’m so bloody
furious with you I wish I’d never clapped eyes on you or your
family.

I’ve never been much of a father, god knows, but I have
to do this for my son. So I’m asking, I’m begging you to do two
things for me. (1) Remember what I did for you and yours in
Vietnam and over here, and (2) go to the magistrate and
drop the AVO against Nigel. Don’t ruin his life.

I’ve been a good friend to you and your family. I’ve kept
all your secrets. I didn’t intrude on your lives when you settled
here. I gave you space and left you to start afresh without
continual reminders of the old days. Think about it. You owe
me this.

Bob Gibson

The Tale of Linh II

But it’s still there, the moon that we swore by: not face to face, we shall stay heart to heart.

A day will last three winters far from you: my tangled knot of grief won’t soon unknit.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Linh was working in the Dong Tam Olympia Bar when the mama-san told her that a GI wanted to talk to her. She looked up and all she could see was his black silhouette in the doorway, the bright haze of afternoon sunlight blazing around him. She hastened towards him, arms eager to embrace.

‘Bucky!’ she cried.

He ducked under low-hanging nylon fishing nets and, when he stepped into the dim light, she saw that it was Bob Gibson. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She glanced around expectantly for Bucky, but he wasn’t there.

‘Sorry, love. Just me this time,’ Bob said. His mouth twisted into a slight smile which did not reach his eyes. He took her arm and led her to a wooden table under a whirring ceiling fan. The waiter hurried over with a Saigon tea for Linh: a small shot-glass of amber liquid which might, by a long stretch of the imagination and a good deal of faith in humanity, have been the Cognac Coke, 120 piastres, cited on the bill but which was, in all probability, simply tea. Bob ordered a beer for himself and glugged it back thirstily, wiping his dripping mouth with the back of his hand when he’d drained half the bottle. Linh sat there, patiently waiting for him to begin their conversation.

‘You’re not a bar-girl, Linh,’ Bob said abruptly, getting straight to the point. ‘You don’t belong here. Why don’t you come back to Saigon? Madame Catinat will have you back. I’ve spoken to her.’

‘She angry. I run away.’

‘No. She understands. She’s very fond of you. She just wants you to be safe.’

‘I earn plenty more here. Pay in Saigon not so good.’ Her lower lip jutted out obstinately. Her eyes slid away from his. ‘In Saigon, family talk. Neighbours talk. Nobody like Bucky and me together. Bucky like here. More better for us. Nobody talk.’

‘Yeah, but how often is he here? A few days every month, sometimes more? You’re wasting your time just waiting for him here.’

She smiled to herself and said nothing. She armoured herself in the impermeably smug confidence of a woman who had been assured—in writing, no less—that she was getting married soon. Bob tried again.

‘Listen, Linh. You’ve got to be realistic. Bucky’s a great guy, I’m not denying that.’

‘He very kind, yes,’ she agreed readily.

‘But do you really think he’s going to marry you? Do you know how many girls get caught up in affairs with GIs thinking they’re going to get married and live happily ever after in America? Most of them get left behind and forgotten. They’re just young boys, they’re not ready to settle down and get married. They’re not serious, don’t you understand?

‘And even if they are, sometimes it’s not up to them. My god, I just heard of a case not too long ago where an Aussie bloke took up with one of you girls. Someone working at the Beachcomber, I think. He promised to marry her but his captain vetoed it. Said she was a communist spy and a traitor to the South Vietnamese government. Said he’d got that from US intelligence. When we poked around and tried to find out if it was true, they shut us up pretty damn quick.’

‘What happen?’ Linh asked, politely interested.

‘His tour ended and he went home without her. It wasn’t worth the risk for him. He was told that if he continued in his relationship with this girl, he might be found shot dead at the perimeter one day. Nobody’d ask questions because it was a war zone.’

‘I hate Viet Cong! I not communist spy.’

‘She probably wasn’t either, don’t you get it?’

‘Bucky love me. He Catholic. No funny business. Look, he gave me this.’ She reached inside her blouse and pulled out a crucifix. ‘Is his mama’s. He write to me he find priest. Soon he marry me. We go to America. I give his god back to his mama.’

‘Yes, he probably loves you. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to marry you. I mean, look at where you work, for god’s sake. You’re better off waiting for him in Saigon.’

‘I not prostitute,’ she said coldly. ‘I only sit with GIs. Smile, talk. I not sleep with many men.’

‘Yeah, I don’t know if he’ll believe that. What man would?’

‘Bucky, he trust me,’ she said angrily. She tapped her breast. ‘He the one make me come to Vung Tau. He know my heart.’

Bob looked at her, and all he could think was how much he envied Bucky. Not so much for the girl, though he could imagine himself falling in love with her one day, given sufficient opportunity. Linh was fairly attractive and sweet and he liked her a lot, but there were many others like her. In any case, there was no future for a bloke like him and an Asian girl like Linh. What he envied, though, was the easy devotion Bucky elicited despite his cheerful ugliness. He was adept at making women feel safe and comfortable. He knew what to say to them, he knew how to show that he was listening. He had the knack of getting them to mother him. For once in his life, Bob thought, he would like to have a girl look at him just like that, as if he meant everything to her.

Bob cleared his throat and took out a letter. He pushed it across the table to Linh. ‘Well, if you won’t listen to me, maybe this’ll change your mind.’

‘What this?’

‘Go on—open it.’

She slid her index finger along the gummed-down flap and exclaimed when her finger was cut. She pulled out the single sheet of paper and began to read the all-toofamiliar Vietnamese verse, sucking the blood from her finger as she did so.

When comes the time for love, the marriage bond, my parents’ wish will tie it or will not.

You deign to care for me, but I’m too young to know what’s right and dare not give my word.

She raised her eyes and looked steadily at Bob. ‘This is from my father?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. I told him I was coming to see you.’

She pushed the piece of paper away from her angrily. ‘Why you go see my father? You talk about me and Bucky. You make me so shame to him.’

‘No. God, Linh, I’d never do that.’

‘Then why? And how you know where he live?’

‘It was through Madame Catinat. People are worried about you, don’t you realise? She sent for Mr Thieu and he asked people where to find you. I had to go with him to see your dad.’

‘You betray Bucky and me,’ she said flatly.

His temper flared. ‘The hell I did. And listen to yourself. If everything was above board and proper with you and that bloody Yank, you wouldn’t have to hide your affair like this.’

‘I not like see you anymore,’ she said.

‘All right. That’s fine with me. Anyway, I’m going home soon. My government—the Australian government—is starting to pull us out of here.’

She was diverted from her resentment. ‘You go home? This your last time in Vung Tau?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m heading back to Saigon for one last weekend there. Then I’ll be at Nui Dat a bit longer. Maybe I’ll pass through here when I take the Vung Tau ferry back to Australia. I don’t know.’

‘Vung Tau ferry?’ Her brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

‘Troop carrier,’ he explained. ‘Unless they fly us back.

Anyway, I won’t be seeing you again, Linh, but you ought to write to your dad. He’s a real nice guy. Your brothers too. When I saw them, I could tell they were really worried about you.’

‘I sorry I angry,’ she said contritely. She put out a tentative hand and touched his fingers. ‘Please, not to be angry with Linh.’

‘I’m not angry with you, Linh,’ he sighed. He returned the clasp of her fingers lightly, then let go. ‘I just hope things work out for you.’

‘Thank you. Everything A-okay, sure thing,’ she predicted confidently. ‘If you go Saigon, you take letter to my father?’

He nodded, and she reached for the letter, turned it over and scrawled a quick four lines in Vietnamese:

It blows one day and rains the next—

how often does chance favour us in spring?

If you ignore and scorn my desperate love,

you’ll hurt me—yet what will it profit you?

‘That’s it? Bit short, isn’t it?’

‘Is from
Kieu
. He understand. He choose first to speak through
Kieu
.’

‘Linh, he loves you, your dad.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re lucky to have so many people love you, then.’

Guilt arrowed swiftly into her heart and tears pricked her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. She merely folded the sheet of paper precisely in two and slid it back into the torn envelope. Then she presented it to him with both hands. ‘I so grateful, Mr Bob. Be safe and happy in
Uc
chau
—your country.
Tam biet
.’

‘If there’s ever anything I can do for you . . .’ He shrugged and slapped down some piastres to settle the bill. ‘
Tam biet
, Linh,’ he said, and without another look at a woman he might have grown to love over time, he walked out of the bar.

She watched him leave and felt a tinge of fear and shame that, in choosing her own happiness, she had openly disobeyed her father. She was too much a Vietnamese daughter not to believe that there would one day be a reckoning. When the months passed and Bucky did not show up, she packed her things and returned to submit herself to her father’s will. She hoped that her act of atonement would balance the scales and bring Bucky back to her.

In early April 1975 Linh yearned for snow even though she had never seen it before. When it rained in Saigon at dawn, she leaned out of the window and caught raindrops on the tip of her tongue. She closed her eyes and imagined silence and whiteness all around her, the cold crispness of snowf lakes melting on her face. Winter would be like this in America, she thought, humming softly to herself.
White Christmas
. The Americans were whistling it, the armed forces radio broadcast it constantly.

Every day the American disc jockey called out, ‘It’s 105 outside and the temperature is rising!’ Immediately after that, Bing Crosby crooned about a white Christmas just like the ones he used to know. Everyone in Saigon was singing that song in April 1975, from the taxi drivers to the cleaners and shoeshine boys. In hotel lobbies, when nervous American guests heard the song they hurried to their secret rendezvous points so that the buses could pick them up and take them out to Tan Son Nhut airport where American evacuation planes were waiting to whisk them away to safety.

Hooters and car horns sounded. People shouted in the street below. Puddles steamed in the humidity. A young man emerged from the terrace house opposite. He looked up and spotted Linh. ‘
Do di ngua
—bitch!’ he spat. ‘American whore.’

Linh hurriedly jerked back inside, glancing over her shoulder to see whether Ai-Van had heard. Her sister-in-law caught her eye and turned away. Linh dropped her own eyes in hot-faced shame.
I don’t care
, she thought.
Bucky and I are engaged
. She dried and combed her hair, then leaned over the mattress where her daughter rolled so that her baby girl could grasp a handful of black silk in a chubby fist. ‘Let me make your own hair pretty,
em be
.’ She combed her daughter’s wiry curls, plaited red and pink ribbons into them, and kissed the child. ‘You play with your cousins now, Tien. Ma has to go to work.’

‘You are spoiling the child. You wait and see,’ AiVan said.

‘No, I am not,’ Linh said. ‘When Bucky returns he will know she has been treated well.’

Ai-Van sniffed. ‘You have heard from him then?’

Linh had not had any kind of contact with Bucky since she returned to Saigon. She had left messages for him with the other girls in the Dong Tam Olympia Bar and the Beachcomber. They told her that he had yet to return to Vung Tau. But she would not lose faith in their love. She clutched the crucifix around her neck and reminded herself that he was going to take her to meet his mother. In the meantime, he had entrusted his daughter to her. He would not abandon them. One day soon, when she least expected it, he would appear out of the blue and collect all that belonged to him, then he would carry them away to America and they would finally be happy. She had to hold on to this thought because, if she lost faith, she would not deserve to have a happy ending to her love story. So she said to Ai-Van, ‘No. Not yet. He is busy fighting in the war.’

‘The American war is over,’ Ai-Van pointed out. ‘Most of the American soldiers have left. More Americans are leaving Saigon every day and still you don’t know where he is.’

Linh said nothing. She pinned up her hair and left for work. Mr Thieu had found her a position as an English teacher in a small high school in Saigon. As was her daily habit, she passed by the boarded-up doorway of Maison Catinat on Tu-Do and stopped in front of the pedlar cooking by the roadside. ‘Good morning, Auntie. Have you seen the American soldier?’

The old woman shook her head and held out a baguette. Linh paid for it and thanked her, then continued on her way.

Linh worked in the school six days a week and rediscovered the pleasure of studying. She spent all her spare time devouring whatever meagre textbooks were left in the school. Eventually, she thought, she would sit for the
Tu Tai
examination herself so that she could be admitted to a university in Vietnam, or even acquire an exit visa to study abroad when Bucky returned. Perhaps she might be eligible to study at one of those American universities, the names of which she threaded through her memory like silver charms on a bracelet: Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Yale. In her iron-willed anticipation of Bucky’s imminent return, no dream seemed too impossible, no desire hidden behind the moon.

A grubby calendar—rather like the ones she used to make in the forgotten days of her brief marriage to Thanh Lam—hung on the schoolroom wall. Pages were torn off and thrown into the unswept streets. Weeks ticked by like a time bomb. The children sat for their examinations. Many did badly and handed their report cards to their fathers, hanging their heads in shame. They could not study at night for the continuous rumbling of bombs and the rattling of machine gun fire from North Vietnamese fighters strafing the sky with red-hot coals. Smoke stung the air and the streets trembled.