Love Like Hate (9 page)

W
here there are no seasons, each day feels pretty much the same. Winter doesn’t come but neither does spring. The leaves don’t change colors and there’s no invigorating first snow. There’s never a blighted sky at midday to lend mood and dignity to madness, only a steady glare to mock all neuroses and despair. In early March, there’s no meek sun emerging to urge the timid seeds from the sullen soil, no trilling bird returning from up north to find its old tree still standing. There are no skeletal branches etched against a slate-colored sky, reindeers shaving roofs and chimneys, Groundhog Days, Oktoberfests, cherry blossoms, or March Madness. Each day there’s the same heat, which can stultify one into thinking that the world is actually permanent and unchanging. Without a gust of arctic wind to chill the bone marrow, some people even forget that their personal winter is fast approaching. Kim Lan established a routine tending to her café and became very fond of many of her customers. Among them was Sen, a Chinese-Vietnamese man recently arrived from Vinh Chau. Cheerful, chatty and always in a brand-new shirt of an outdated fashion, he was an idler who had apparently bribed his way out of military service. His one passion was chess, and he brought a set to her café each day to play against all challengers. He was so good he always had to handicap himself by starting without a rook or a knight. Sen preferred Western chess to the more popular Chinese version. The differences between the
two games are crucial. In Chinese chess, the king cannot leave his little area, a symbolic Forbidden City. There’s also a river to cross and no queen. What is chess without the damn queen?! The most powerful piece in Western chess, a queen that can zap you in all directions, doesn’t exist on a Chinese chessboard. Sen’s favorite moment wasn’t checkmate, but when he could finally bag his opponent’s queen. He played quickly and distractedly, jabbering and hardly looking at the board, but the results were nearly always the same. He never competed for exorbitant stakes, lest he bankrupt his opponents, leading to hard feelings, retaliation, or suicide. Once he became a little too distracted and lost his queen early. Concentrating hard, he fought and fought and finally won, infuriating his opponent into cursing and overturning the chessboard. Everyone in the café anticipated an altercation, but Sen kept his composure. He simply sat and stared at his adversary with a peculiar smile on his face. Some interpreted this as amused contempt, others as fear. In any case, the sore loser quickly apologized, picked up all the pieces by himself, paid Sen, then left, never to be seen again. Sen made good money from chess, but Kim Lan had a hunch he already had lots of money. Carefree and leisurely, he seemed determined to sit out the entire war in her café. Months would go by, but he never seemed the least bit bored. She never suspected that he had a secret reason to stay put. Busy with the customers, she never noticed that his eyes were furtively surveying her every inch.

Sen’s spoken Vietnamese was only passable but he was committed to improving it. Too self-conscious to buy a Vietnamese newspaper, he would from time to time peruse those left behind by the other patrons. He could string the lumpy roman letters together, forming sounds in his head, but many words remained opaque. In the
Tatler
, there was a section called “Car Ran over Dog, Dog Ran over Car.” These brief accounts of accidents employed a limited vocabulary in simple constructions, such as: “An eighteen-wheeler struck a bicycle, killing a sixty-six-year-old coconut vendor.” Knowing all the words
except “eighteen-wheeler” and “struck,” Sen could deduce that whatever an “eighteen-wheeler” was, it had killed a coconut vendor by “strucking” his or her bicycle. He also glanced at the battle reports. These were even easier to decipher: “Last night in Kontum, we killed twelve, captured three. Our side suffered three light injuries.” Twelve to three, Sen concluded,
so we won!
, feeling more Vietnamese with the sentiment. Sen had noticed that many Vietnamese slowed their speech and raised their voices whenever they addressed him. Some even affected vaguely Chinese accents. He appreciated that Kim Lan never did that.

Though economically successful, the Chinese in Vietnam had no social standing. Children sang racist songs about them and their accents were mocked, even on television. In remote Vinh Chau, a tiny village by the coast, Sen’s father had a business raising carp. He was one of the first to use fish feed with growth hormones and his profits were enormous. His carp often grew to the size of dolphins and could swim just as fast. He also had twenty acres of land on which he grew onions and other crops. A first-generation immigrant, he had arrived from Sichuan with nothing more than a straw hat, a shirt and a pair of shorts. He had neither shoes nor slippers. Even when he could afford quality footwear decades later, his splayed toes could not endure being jammed inside a stuffy pair of leather wingtips. Thank God, plastic flip-flops had finally been invented. Aiming for San Francisco, the old man had settled for Vietnam. He was satisfied with his life except that he had yearned for years, without success, to have a son. After the birth of his third daughter, he became so enraged with his wife that he threatened to give all of their daughters away. She had to kneel on the floor and beg him to hang on to their children. “Give me one more chance,” she sobbed. “I promise I’ll make you a son next year.” True to her word, Sen was born a year later. Relieved, the rich man threw a month-long feast for all of his neighbors. He slaughtered cows, pigs, chickens and goats, and everyone drank the best rice and snake
wines from sunset to sunrise for an entire month. The rich man grinned at his son’s tapered sprout the size of a tabasco and rubbed his nose affectionately against his wife’s face. Sen was breast-fed by his adoring mother until he was one, then he sucked on his grandmother’s dry titties until he was six, then he nibbled on one pacifier after another until he finally went to school at nine—his father couldn’t bear to let him out of the house any earlier. It took him three years to complete the first grade. If it rained or was too hot outside, Sen was kept at home. When he did go to school, he was always carried on the back of one of his three sisters. This arrangement lasted until he was fifteen and too chubby to be loaded onto anyone’s back. Until ten, he was always bathed by his mother. Until twelve, his sisters had to spoon-feed him at mealtimes.

7
MOUSE CHILD

I
n late 1970 Kim Lan finally conceived. Hoang Long seemed delighted by the news, but she was apprehensive. All day long she stood sideways in front of the mirror, frowning and rubbing her belly. To help her out with household chores and the operation of her café, she hired a domestic servant, a dark girl from Cu Chi.

The war had displaced millions of people, forcing countless girls from the countryside to seek work in the city, but jobs were scarce. The Americans were withdrawing and most bars—the Golden Cock, Pink Pussycat, Magic Finger Lounge, Buffalo Tom, Bar Bar, etc.—had to shut down. James Brown ceased to holler, grunt and plead from the soulful joints of Khanh Hoi. No more roiling bass lines and gaggles of charming hostesses to offer full privileges nightly to the foreign-born, irrespective of age, weight, physical appearance, interpersonal skills or social class. No kidding! Sorry about that! Even the Royal on Nguyen Hue Street, open since 1962, the first eatery in Saigon to serve cheeseburgers with real buns instead of sliced bread, went under. Spanky, Cowboy, Slim, Pimp, Gladly, Killer, the Weasel were going back to their sweethearts and Chevies, leaving behind sons and daughters and half-empty glasses of Saigon Tea on the table. No more of the sweet-voiced, omniscient, if occasionally ungrammatical, Hanoi Hannah—“How are you, GI Joe?”—to needle them about race riots and cheating girlfriends back home, or encourage grunts to frag blowhard officers.
Many bar girls had to go back to the rice paddies or open small shops selling soft drinks and trinkets. Some shaved their heads, lit incense, chanting
namyo
or “Ave Maria.” Some, with their very own Spankies and Weasels, even moved to America.

The locals never quite got the hang of sitting on high stools to drink liquor while contemplating their groggy faces in the mirror, a TV droning in the background. Perched on a bar stool, your feet removed from the ground and your head closer to the sky, you felt less a part of this earth. Hardly comfortable on chairs, much less bar stools, they preferred to squat on their haunches, like a woman piddling alfresco. That was another reason the bars had to shut down.

Meanwhile, Kim Lan continued to stand in front of the mirror, frowning and rubbing her belly. Visiting neighbors reminded her to look at the beautiful faces on calendars, so her baby would be just as beautiful.
Don’t cut cloth with scissors
, they warned,
or your child will have a harelip. Don’t use uneven chopsticks, or the baby’s legs will be uneven
. At the sight of the deformed and the handicapped, they advised her to turn her gaze away. She was told never to squat inside a door frame, lest she have a difficult childbirth, requiring forceps, resulting in a pointy-headed baby.
Don’t eat too much
, they also told her,
or the baby will be too big, and hard to get out
. She could barely eat anyway. At four months, she stayed in bed all day. Even in hundred-degree heat, she’d be under a mound of blankets, in complete darkness, shivering. She could not stomach anything the servant placed in front of her.

“What is this?”

“Crab soup with bamboo shoots, ma’am.”

“You know I hate canned bamboo shoots!”

“You always liked it before, ma’am.”

“And this crab stinks. Is it spoiled?”

“No, of course not. I can add some sesame oil, if you like.”

“Please take it away and let me sleep.”

The war kept up its intensity and Hoang Long had to skip his
leave a few times. In 1971, he came home just twice and had to cut short his stay both times. “You must understand,” he explained to his worried wife, “I cannot be away from my men at a time like this.” In June 1971, as Hoang Long was fighting in Long Khanh, Kim Lan went to Hung Vuong Hospital to give birth to a boy weighing just four pounds. She named him Cun.

Cun resembled a naked mole rat at birth and would go on to resemble a naked mole rat for the rest of his life. When his teeth started to sprout, he even bit his mom several times a day. He also liked to bite other children and pinch them, especially on the inner thighs. He cried all day and night and rejected whatever his mom fed him—carrots, peas, pap or pabulum. Disagreeing with all baby formulas, he refuted both milk and soy, spat out Good Start and threw up the Dutch Girl. Exasperated, Kim Lan went to a medicine man and got a red string with a black bead to tie around Cun’s neck. This was supposed to calm him down but she saw zero improvement in her son’s mood or behavior. As Cun grew a little older, he never passed up an opportunity to yank an animal’s tail or ear or squash anything that could be squashed. If he saw a live crab, he would immediately sever its antennae and wait impatiently for an eye to stick out so he could pinch it and roll it between his fingers.

When Hoang Long came home for Christmas of 1971, he saw Cun for the first time. He was so disappointed he could not even feign a smile.
This has to be the ugliest baby ever
, he shook his head.
Could this be someone else’s child? Has she been screwing around with some of these losers loitering in the café? Look at how she banters with them, always laughing and giggling. A married woman shouldn’t be giggling with strangers
. But as he looked more closely at the horrible mouse child, he noticed that the smirking mouth was unmistakably his own.

Kim Lan could clearly see her husband’s discomfort toward Cun. More troubling to her, however, was the fact that he was not wearing his wedding ring. She had never seen him without his ring. Even odder, the skin where the ring should be didn’t appear
any lighter. His entire finger was uniformly brown. She was about to say something, but for some reason, unclear even to herself, she decided to let it pass. On his next leave, he was wearing his ring again.

Kim Lan also noticed that her husband seemed more tired yet more restless with each visit. He didn’t take her out to restaurants like he used to. “I just want to stay home,” he said. “It’s so nice just to be home. I don’t want to deal with the noise and the glares and looking at people stuffing their faces. It disgusts me to see people laughing and eating in a restaurant. People in Saigon act as if there’s no war going on. All the restaurants and movie theaters are filled with hippie draft dodgers in bell-bottom pants!”

“Why don’t we go to the zoo then? It’d give Cun a chance to see the animals.”

“All he’ll see there are the freaks! The zoo has been taken over by hippies!”

“How do you know? You haven’t been there since before we got married. Remember how we used to take long romantic walks through the zoo?”

Hoang Long simply closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and sighed. The phrase “long romantic walks” had apparently upset some chemical balance in him. Kim Lan understood Hoang Long’s irritation with hippies—she hated them, too—but her husband was hardly home when he was at home. He barely dealt with her at all. Instead of talking to his wife, he spent most of his time watching TV, either the American station showing
Bonanza, I Love Lucy
, or
Bewitched
, or folk opera, news, or sports on the Vietnamese channel. Instead of eating with a bowl and chopsticks at the table, he preferred his food on an individual plate, so he could eat and watch TV at the same time. He loved his sixteen-inch Fuji black and white, with its long, splaying legs and side-closing doors. It was the centerpiece of the house. He never played with his son. If Cun was making too much noise, he would snap, “Get this kid to shut up,
will you?” Once, as he was watching soccer and Cun was crying, he even yelled, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll smack your face!”