Love Like Hate (19 page)

“What did I do, ma’am?” the girl started to sob. “I did not do anything!”

“Stop acting! Do you think I’m blind?!”

Though Pha made a huge scene, sobbing and threatening to commit suicide by jumping into the path of a car, Kim Lan knew she had to be firm. These girls used tricks to play with your emotions. Still, seeing Pha walk out the door carrying a burlap sack containing all her possessions, Kim Lan did feel a twinge of pity. She even thought that maybe Pha had stolen from her out of revenge:
It’s true that I yelled at her a lot, but I mean well, I really do—I have a kind heart. I have high blood pressure—from yelling all the time—but I have a kind heart. Don’t I have the right to yell once in a while? Haven’t I had a hard enough life? In any case, if you don’t yell at these servants, they break and ruin everything. I give my servants my old clothes and I let them watch Taiwanese videos in the evening so they can relax. We watch romantic films and cry together. I never let them go out alone lest they come back pregnant. These girls are so naive and horny, they get knocked up within seconds of leaving the house, since they don’t know anything about city men or beer or pills or condoms. I warn them against certain neighborhood boys while recommending others. Not too long ago, I even managed to hook one of my girls up with a widower. Ugly as sin, she was pushing thirty and would never have found a taker had I not intervened. They’re living happily together down the street, though I hear he beats her occasionally. In general, I tell my servants, Don’t be so anxious, calm down, don’t be in such a hurry to find a boyfriend, I’ll find you a good one when I think you’re ready. Your virginity is all you have, I always remind them. Don’t give it to a ragpicker.
Remember the four Confucian feminine virtues: industry, appearance, speech and behavior. You must work hard, look modest, keep quiet and not spread your legs for strangers. That’s why they must stay with me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I allow them to go home for Tet or a death in the family—I even pay for the bus tickets—but these girls don’t want to go home any more than necessary. Having filial obedience, they do send money back to their mothers, but they’d never want to live in their old villages again. Once you’ve had a taste of Saigon, you’re hooked for life. They also eat much better with me than they ever did at home. Living with me, these girls eat fish, pork and beef regularly. They eat with us, at the same table, and if they’re hungry between meals they can even cook up a packet of Miliket instant noodles. Each one of those costs two thousand
dong!

Kim Lan finally concluded that, no, she hadn’t done anything wrong.
These girls are greedy and dishonest and that’s all there is to it. You can’t really trust anybody nowadays
.

26
A SERVANT’S TALE

P
ha was twenty-two and had had two jobs in her life. Before becoming a domestic servant in Saigon, she had caught crabs in Tra Vinh. This is her story:
Our house was made of bamboo and palm leaves. It creaked like a swinging hammock. There was no door in the doorway. At night we lay on straw mats on the dirt floor. For privacy we blew out the candle. We grew water spinach in a green pond. Above this pond was a yellow moon. When my father was not drunk, he worked. I stood in mud and caught crabs. We had five chickens and seven ducks. We sold eggs to make money. We rarely ate eggs ourselves. Eggs go well with water spinach. Each day I saved three crabs for us to eat. If I found a shrimp I ate it raw. I love the sensation of mud between my toes. I also like the smell of mud. What I love best is the sight of a water buffalo lying on its back in the mud and the sloshing sounds of pigs eating. If I were tired I’d lie down and sleep like a dead cat by the side of a road. I caught about thirty crabs a day. Sticking my hand into a hole I snatched them, one by one. Sometimes they snapped at me first. A female crab always hurt more. Sometimes a snake slept inside the hole. I also worried about leeches. A leech’s sucker looks like the ribbed mouth of a balloon. I would see him but before I could lift my leg he would be stuck to my calf. If you don’t pour lime on him he’ll be on you for about ten minutes. Some leeches last minutes longer. Say: I am not losing anything, I can spare a little blood, I have plenty of blood left. A leech cannot be destroyed. Chop him into a dozen pieces and you have a dozen leeches. Burn him, scatter his ash, but with the first rainfall, he’ll reform himself into a new leech. A girl has to be
extra careful around these leeches. If one wiggles into your body’s opening you’ll give birth to an army of leeches. My legs were purple from leech bites and my hands were puffy from crab bites, but my face was unmarked
.

What exactly is a house made of bamboo and palm leaves? It’s called a leaf house. Made of palm leaves woven over a bamboo frame, a leaf house may not be practical in northern Vietnam, which has a cold season, but in the South, it can be the ideal dwelling. First of all, it is cheap: A leaf house can be erected for $150 or less in about three days. You get a room for lounging and sleeping in the front, plus a kitchen in the back. The bathroom is any body of water nearby, or just the ground, with or without a hole in it. Water is stored in three large jars (embossed with dragons) placed just outside the back door. In a leaf house, you don’t need to sweep the dirt off the floor because the floor is already made of dirt. A leaf house is much cooler than any other kind of house, so air-conditioning isn’t necessary. Many leaf houses now have electricity, so a flickering black-and-white TV can sit next to your laptop on the glass coffee table. You can go hightech and install a satellite dish on top of your leaf house. One disadvantage of a leaf house is that it will fall apart within five years, meaning you will have to come up with another $150.

Pha didn’t mention her town’s entertainment center, a sort of nightly country fair on a spread of dirt near the main market. Little lightbulbs were strung between trees; neon tubes illuminated booths. There was a creaking merry-go-round where grim children revolved on rusty horses, cars and helicopters. There was a roller skating rink the size of a New York one-bedroom where teenage boys and girls could grind and bump into each other, pirouette on their haunches, or glide backward to the beeps and thumps of techno music. Pha had never had a boyfriend so she never learned how to skate. At a shooting gallery, one could try to knock Ping-Pong balls from the tops of bottles to win a package of instant noodles, a can of root beer, or soy milk. At another booth, manned by a whistling fairy gone haywire with his made-in-China eyeliner,
one could bet the numbers to score laundry detergent or a bag of MSG. Framing all these festivities was a stage at the back on which a forlorn man sat behind his silent drum set.

No clowns, pythons or bearded ladies. A bearded man was rare enough.

27
A GAGGED AUDIENCE

F
or the rest of 1989, Kim Lan sent several packages to Hoang Long, but she didn’t visit him again. Too many deaths in the family would arouse Sen’s suspicions. To fool him, she continued to light incense sticks, close her eyes and pray in front of Hoang Long’s framed photo on the altar. She didn’t pray for real, of course, but her lips moved with conviction as her mind went blank. Every now and then, she’d let out a long sigh or a sob, even when no one was looking. Another letter arrived from prison with a different list of essentials. Money still rolled in, but money kept disappearing.
So it hadn’t been Pha after all
. Though she half suspected A-Muoi, she decided to solve the problem once and for all by purchasing a safe with a combination lock. Fire- and waterproof, it could withstand ten thousand degrees Celsius, the heat of a nuclear bomb—or so claimed its Taiwanese manufacturer.

Deprived of funds, Cun thought of marriage for the first time in his life. It’s neither enslavement of woman nor of man but a slo-mo collision of two better halves. He hardly knew any girls who weren’t prostitutes, however. The new domestic servant didn’t look half bad but, at nineteen years old, she already had a three-year-old born out of wedlock. Cun never thought of applying for a job and making his own money. Aside from an insistent sex drive that was literal, verbatim and monosyllabic, Cun had no volition at all; he was ruled by fear. To him, the world was a frightening riddle, with nearly everyone in it—men and women, young and old, all nationalities—more
powerful and vicious than he was. The world had imprisoned and humiliated his father, a man much more virile and capable than he, so it would no doubt kill him the second he crawled out of his hole. The only ones he was not afraid of were his sister and the domestic servants.

The domestic servants made Cun feel powerful. He felt so potent around them, he literally flexed his muscles in their presence—styling, voguing and doing bits of calisthenics as if he were onstage in a vast yet intimate arena, performing for a gagged audience of just one. He always addressed them with an arrogant, vindictive voice he never dared use with other people. Normally he whinnied and honked, but place a domestic servant in front of him and he could boom like a drill sergeant. He loved to boss them around with abrupt commands: “Get me a glass of water!” or “Buy me a pack of cigarettes!” Because a servant girl could not talk back to him, he felt free to yell at her at any time and to lecture her on the most diverse topics. While she squatted on the floor, doing the laundry or the dishes, he’d try to educate her about politics, Buddhism, the pope, or manned flights to the moon, whatever tidbits of news he’d managed to snatch from the television that day, things he half remembered or simply made up. He would say, for example, that the United States had fifty-two states, all covered in ice. “That’s why they have free love over there. It’s the weather.” If she dared to laugh or roll her eyes at him, he’d smack her on the head. “Do you know that in Japan, men and women take showers together?” he said one day. “Utter strangers taking a shower together. To save water. If you and I were in Japan, we would be taking a shower together every day.”

If two people take a shower together, they still use the same amount of water
, the servant thought, but said nothing. Standing a few feet away, Cun had just taken his shirt off. Wearing only shorts, he started to do his exercises. Having seen this performance many times, she paid no attention. Sweating a river, he stretched and contorted until his swelling finally went down.

One day, Cun saw a strange girl squatting on the sidewalk in front of Paris by Night. A fishmonger, Phuong had just arrived from Chau Doc. Southwest of Saigon, Chau Doc was right next to Cambodia. Even with its lucrative border traffic in contraband, it was still an unusually poor town. Half the houses were thatch huts. (And we’re talking leaning, decrepit thatch huts, with their one item of luxury a constantly glowing black-and-white TV.) Back home, Phuong’s mother would just stir-fry some rice with MSG and call it dinner. That’s why Phuong had to come to Saigon. Too homely to work in a hostess bar, she didn’t want to deal with the nonsense of being a domestic servant either. That’s why she sold fish.

Phuong hardly ever talked or smiled. No one had ever seen her laugh. Maybe she had crooked teeth, or no teeth at all, and was afraid to open her thin, bloodless lips. From six in the morning, you’d find her squatting behind a tin basin hopping with climbing perches. Climbing perches are small, bony fish that can live out of water briefly and travel short distances overland. They are delicious marinated with fish sauce, sugar and black peppers, then stewed. Some people prefer them in a soup. A sadistic climbing perch monger, Phuong would take a fish and snip, with scissors, its tail, anal fin, dorsal fin, pelvic fin, ventral fin, pectoral fin, then, finally, head. If she had only reversed this order, the climbing perch would not have thrashed about during the process. Sitting in the café, Cun could observe Phuong methodically mutilating her wiggly, pinkie-sized fish. Her casual cruelty horrified and soothed him. Identifying with both fish and scissors, he found them equally arousing. Touching himself each night, his eyes shut tight, his mouth wide open, he’d conjure up Phuong’s nimble fingers glistening with fish blood and slime as she snuffed out yet another climbing perch’s life.