Love Like Hate (3 page)

“We’re not rich, honey, and I don’t see anyone rich in this neighborhood.”

“There are plenty of rich people, believe me, and the country itself is rich.”

“Well, I haven’t seen a rich American yet.”

“And you won’t see them. They live out on the Main Line. We Vietnamese dress loud and wear gold jewelry to show that we’re rich, but rich Americans just wear T-shirts and jeans like everybody else. About the only Americans who wear big gold jewelry are the drug dealers.”

“I’ve seen these guys with gold chains sitting in big jeeps playing really loud music. Are they drug dealers?”

“If they’re not, then they’re trying to pose as drug dealers. It’s cool to be a drug dealer in America. Do you like those cool trucks? I know a guy who owns a Jeep Cherokee. Maybe we can get one of those in the future. If we get the right financing, it won’t cost much each month.”

“Maybe you should just quit your job and start selling drugs.”

Huyen thought about the young drug dealers with their gold jewelry. Although they acted tough and menacing, they appeared troubled and frightened in their Hummers, stuck in traffic with the ear-splitting music. The more insecure you were, the more simplistically your mind worked: I must flash gold in people’s faces to show that I have money. Realizing this, she stopped wearing gold. She remembered how her mom used to wear pajamas in public, yet was never seen without her gold earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, diadems, pins and anklets. Her mom had given her a jade bracelet for her eighteenth birthday. The more she stared at it now, the more it annoyed her. A status symbol, it was translucent green with a touch of red, and worth at least five hundred bucks. After spending half an hour trying to wrench it from her right wrist, yanking it against her carpal bones and bruising her skin, she finally banged on it with a butter knife, shattering it into pieces.

“Why do Americans say ‘shit’ all the time?” she asked Jaded.

“I don’t know. Do they?”

“Yes, they do. It’s always shit this, shit that.”

“I guess you’re right. If you’re drunk here, they say you’re shit-faced!”

Huyen thought about this and concluded that Americans said shit all the time because they lived in a
clean
country. In Vietnam, a filthy country where shit was often on display, where it was no mystery, people rarely conjured it up in a conversation, but in America, which was superclean, it was an inevitable verbal tic: “Holy shit,” “That shit’s wack,” “She thinks she’s hot shit but she ain’t dogshit.” She noticed the American penchant for personal slogans, as evident on bumper stickers and T-shirts: “Watch out for the idiot behind me,” “I wasn’t born a bitch, men like you made me this way,” “Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.” She noticed that many Americans had volunteered to walk around town as advertisements for their favorite brands: Nike, Pepsi, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Halliburton.

She learned about American precision. Huyen became aware that America was a country of straight lines and geometric exactness where everything must be quantified: your breasts, your income, your batting average. Life must be constantly measured to show that profits and progress were being made. She noticed a parallel between capitalism and Communism: Both loved to count, since both were materialistic. More wealth equaled more happiness, hence the constant need to take stock of everything. But Vietnamese were poor counters, she reflected. Their traditional units of measurements were inexact. They liked to fudge, round off numbers, manipulate scales, ignore rulers. Before the French arrived, they didn’t count the hours or tick off the seconds. Time was the angle of the sun and the shape of the moon. They went to bed with the hens and woke up with the roosters. Not knowing their birth year, many peasants couldn’t count their own age. It’s true they didn’t have much to count to begin with. The only thing the peasants were adept at counting was their innumerable offspring. Instead of proper names,
they referred to their kids as “fourth daughter,” “tenth son,” etc. People who couldn’t count couldn’t build very much. Vietnamese buildings, old and new, were often ill proportioned, lumpy, their lines inelegant. And there was nothing remotely like an Angkor Wat in all of Vietnam.

On his days off, Jaded took Huyen to the Franklin Mills Mall, the biggest shopping center in the Philadelphia area. There she could finally feel a sense of community. She loved all the smiling, attentive faces. “May I help you? May I help you?” Above all, she loved the luxuriously displayed merchandise. It pained Jaded to see his wife lust after so many things they could not afford. They ended each shopping expedition with only token purchases, such as cheap polyester underwear or junk from the Dollar Store. To his suggestion that they go to the zoo or a museum, she always answered, “No, I want to go to the mall, if only to look.” The shopping mall was already a museum to her. Fingering blouses and skirts and sniffing leather coats, she appeared so enraptured he thought she might just steal something.

With so little money, Huyen always tried to buy the cheapest food available. When it came to meat, there was nothing cheaper than scrapple. A Pennsylvania delicacy, scrapple was made up of pig tendons, cartilage, feet, skin, ears, eyes, gums, snouts and rectums, all solidified with cornmeal and seasoned. The decidedly bitter eardrums were usually left out of the mix. Huyen read the ingredients and found everything agreeable but the cornmeal. She bought it anyway and boiled it with instant noodles. To her surprise, the scrapple dissolved into a gray slosh.

Later, Huyen would visit many other American cities besides Philadelphia. Some were beautiful, some not, but in all she would find the same remoteness and blankness. She tricked herself into thinking that her alienated state was only a result of being an alien. The natives must have a secret strategy to cope with it. She reminded herself that assimilation was a gradual process: You learned
English, met people, learned the country’s history, its pastimes and perversions, then doors opened and you were allowed in. Only slowly did she realize that America was always a flat and transparent surface, with all desirable things just on the other side. To be disillusioned with paradise on earth was to be disillusioned with life itself. There were many other countries, however, 195 to be exact.

As the years passed, Huyen slowly changed. She got a job at McDonald’s, did her job well and won many Employee of the Week awards. She even learned to talk shit with the best of them. When the other crew members greeted her with “Yo bitch!” she’d answer, “Whattup, assbucket?”

3
LET’S LEARN ENGLISH!

H
aving decided that Hoa would marry a Viet Kieu, that her future would be in America, Kim Lan wanted her daughter to study English immediately. There were dozens of English-language schools in Saigon. Any high-school dropout from San Diego to Sidney could get a teaching job there and be paid well for it, if he was white. The locals simply equated white skin with a mastery of the master language. Salman Rushdie or V. S. Naipaul would not have been hired. The less expensive schools used local teachers. There was the Lego Institute, which advertised: “Build your English skill block by block.” There was the Gertrude Stein Academy: “To speak, on an endless shelf, there’s English.” Kim Lan enrolled Hoa at the most prestigious one: the New York School of English. Everyone on its staff was advertised as being a native of one of the boroughs. There was a mural of Manhattan in the school lobby and, standing on a cardboard box next to the registration desk, a foam Statue of Liberty. The school’s bold slogan: “
ANSWER ALL YOUR QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH WITHIN A YEAR
.”

Invigorated by her violent hope of acquiring a new language, Hoa threw herself into her studies. Kim Lan marveled at the sight of Hoa bent over her exercise book. She encouraged Hoa to practice her lessons out loud. Single words, phrases, anything. It was pure music to her ear when Hoa said things like, “I do. You do. He does.” Or: “Skiing and skating are my favorite sports.” Or: “I’m pregnant
and I need to have an abortion.” She asked Hoa, “How do you say ‘mother’ in English?”

“Mama!”

“From now on, I want you to call me mama!”

She bought Hoa a nice dictionary with a colorful illustration next to each word.
My First Dictionary
, it was called, “recommended ages: four to eight.” Encouraging Hoa to use this dictionary, Kim Lan would say, “Remember Malcolm X!” Kim Lan had discovered Malcolm X in a magazine called
Today’s Knowledge
. Although it had few pages and was no bigger than her palm,
Today’s Knowledge
was chock-full of information. In the October 1999 issue, it asked: “Did you know that Malcolm X was a black leader against American capitalism? A pimp who rose to prominence while in prison, Malcolm X taught himself English by memorizing every word of a dictionary.” Since
My First Dictionary
only had about two hundred words, Kim Lan figured Hoa could memorize the entire dictionary in about a year or so, and be fluent in English just like Malcolm X. In the same issue of
Today’s Knowledge
, Kim Lan learned that Ho Chi Minh had taught himself French by scrawling ten new words on his arms each day. That’s 3,650 words a year, she thought incredulously, on such spindly arms? Overlaid with a million words, blue-black with knowledge, Uncle Ho’s arms lay dimly lit in a glass coffin. Kim Lan thought of Japanese
yakuzas
tattooed from head to toes.
Horimono
, is it?

Kim Lan also enrolled Hoa in an aerobic dance class so she could listen to American music as she learned how to dance like an American. To round out her daughter’s education, Kim Lan took Hoa to Kentucky Fried Chicken. The first American fast-food joint in Saigon was a KFC that opened in 1997 near the airport. It had few customers. For the price of a two-piece meal you could feast on five courses at another restaurant. About the only people who ate there were tourists, expats, Viet Kieus and the nouveau riche. Kim Lan took Hoa to this KFC every weekend. It was a glamorous place
where the floor was clean and the uniformed employees courteous. Staring at the brightly lit menu overhead, Kim Lan asked Hoa, “What does it say?”

Mustering up all her mental energy, Hoa slowly translated out loud, “Prepared the Colonel’s way using the freshest select ingredients for a tangy, sweet, one-of-a-kind, satisfying taste.”

“And what does that say?”

“The Colonel’s famous freshly baked biscuits served up hot and flaky just like they’ve been for generations.”

Finding the chicken greasy and the coleslaw inedible, they still pronounced everything delicious. Kim Lan ate the jive mashed potatoes with the little plastic fork/spoon while eyeing the Viet Kieus chowing down at adjacent tables. She loved the way their conversations were interlarded with odd bits of English, words such as “good,” “you,” and “boring.” Annoyed by her stares, a Viet Kieu of Hoa’s age glared at Kim Lan, shaking his head. “Good good!” she smiled at him, waving a drumstick. The other two English words she knew were “money” and “mama.” She scrutinized the Viet Kieus’ clothes for clues on how to dress her daughter.
You must look like them if you want to attract them
, she figured. She also took Hoa to the Baskin-Robbins downtown to sample all forty flavors of American ice cream. When Lotteria opened on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, Kim Lan and Hoa were among the first to enter. They quickly became fans of the hot squid, rye shrimp and bulgogi burgers. They never found out that Lotteria wasn’t American, but Korean fast food.

Lotteria is actually a Japanese company. Why would a Japanese company peddle Korean versions of American fast food under an Italian name? Lotteria is a subsidiary of Lotte Co. Ltd. Its founder, Takeo Shigemitsu, named his baby after Charlotte in
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. He wanted his company’s products to be as endearing as Charlotte, and as enduring as Charlotte. Lotte manufactures gum, chocolate and soft drinks. Besides fast-food joints, it owns hotels,
department stores, a theme park and a baseball team, the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan’s Pacific League. Even with Goethe batting cleanup, it hasn’t won a pennant in thirty years.

A new Saigon fad appeared in 1993. Street vendors started to sell used clothing known as AIDS clothes, not after the disease, but because they had been given by Western aid organizations. For fifty cents you could have an AIDS T-shirt donated the year before by some churchgoer from Toledo, Ohio. For two bucks you could own a frayed pair of AIDS jeans. AIDS belts, purses, shoes and underwear were also available. Kim Lan wouldn’t let Hoa touch AIDS clothes. “Sooner or later you’ll die from them. I’ll buy you real American clothes.”

4
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS OHIO