The Eaves of Heaven (4 page)

I repeated her precise directions from the Main Post Office at the center of Saigon to her uncle’s house in a middle-class neighborhood on the opposite side of the city from mine. Then I said that on my first day back in Saigon, I would get a haircut and a shave. I would put on my best shirt, buy the prettiest bouquet of flowers, then take a cyclo to her house because, after all, the man she’d met in Dalat was a handsome cadet and I didn’t want to look like a disheveled, sweaty bum who had walked across the city.

Anh giggled, squeezed my hand, and showed her pleasure by preparing my coffee. She lifted the lid of the espresso press, turned it upside down on the table, placed the press on top, and stirred the condensed milk at the bottom of the glass until all of it had turned into a caramel swirl. She presented the glass with both hands, then waited for me to taste it before preparing hers. These were traditional gestures of affection, and for the first time in my life, I allowed myself to revel in them.

I was twenty-four and had never been with a woman. I knew nothing about love, and everything I knew about sex I had seen while managing our inn in Hanoi. For a young lad who hadn’t so much as held a girl’s hand or even seen adults kissing, the sight of peasant girls rendered homeless by war and desperate by hunger prostituting themselves to the French soldiers was shocking. They were no different from the girls I had grown up with in the countryside. The experience tainted not only my idea of sex, but also my general view of women. Since then I resisted the advances of girls. I feared I was ruined.

I had thought I would never marry.

It was a miracle to meet Anh and feel my insides flip-flopping about. I was desperate to hang onto her, if only to make these emotions last a little longer. I liked the way I felt when I was near her.

I gave her the thin package I kept under my coat. It was a silk scarf I had seen her admire. She gave a sharp cry of delight that made everyone turn around. She bound her long black hair in it—which somehow made me immensely pleased.

Holding hands underneath the table, we huddled like conspirators over our chicory coffee. The man brought us a platter of fresh vegetables, herbs, and pickled radishes, and two plates with big, fat crepes made from a batter of rice flour, turmeric, and coconut milk. They were crunchy on the outside, moist and slightly chewy in the middle, coddling a steamy center of bean sprouts, mung beans, and a mix of sautéed pork, shrimp, and scallion. We broke the crepes, dipped pieces in a delicate lime-chili fish sauce, and ate them with sprigs of cilantro, fresh lettuce, basil, and
la chua,
sour leaves that tasted like green apples. The scallion oil in the crepe glistened on the fresh herbs like a light salad dressing. Anh fed me perfect morsels wrapped in crisp lettuce. And, as she had promised, the milk-coffee was a fabulous accompaniment. Small, unforgettable decadence. I enjoyed being here with her so much, I couldn’t stop smiling. I had never felt this way. I stole a kiss and tasted tangy sugared lime on her lips.

We ate, oblivious to the crowd, the bustling shops, the humming traffic, the jostling pedestrians, the chanting hawkers. Rain-water ran green in the gutter. A lavender hue fell over the town, softening the cries of babies, the bells of donkey carts, errant laughter. Even the pale moss-washed buildings lost their edges. The world went all crumbly, and I was keen only on the red curves of her lips, the way she gasped after a bite of chili, the unbelievably delicious warmth of her thigh against mine.

THE NORTH
AUGUST
1940

6. T
HE
M
ID-
A
UTUMN
F
ESTIVAL

U
nder the looming shadow of war, Uncle Thuan performed one of the wisest acts in his life. It would mark the pinnacle of our clan’s ascendancy, and also the dawn of our quick dissolution. He opened his personal treasury, instructed the servants to ready his ancestral estate, summoned the fireworks-maker from Hanoi, and bestowed upon the village an extravagant Mid-Autumn Festival—an event that would be well remembered among those who lived to see the next millennium.

I was seven years old that year and remembered the great swell of excitement and activities that overtook the estate. At the time, I had two younger brothers and four cousins, all Uncle Thuan’s children from three wives, living at our ancestral estate. My father had decided not to come home for the festival, so I had a wonderful time. It was thrilling for my cousins and me to watch all the carpenters and craftsmen prepare for the celebration. We tailed them everywhere and got underfoot at every opportunity.

The preparation began immediately after the Rituals of Forgiveness in mid-July, a full month in advance. Walls received fresh coats of paint. Roofs were mended, squeaky doors oiled. Three bedrooms were added to the guests’ wing to accommodate relatives coming from distant provinces. New sleeping mats were laid in all quarters. Moon-gazing divans were built, flower gardens expanded, strolling paths cleared, courtyards repaired. Workers installed additional stoves in the main kitchen. In the garden next to the carp pond and the existing cow-roasting pit, bricklayers constructed earth kilns with unbaked clay bricks for roasting piglets and chickens. A thousand moon cakes were ordered from renowned Chinese bakeries in Hanoi. Gifts of livestock, silk, porcelain wares, and jewelry were purchased and sent out with the invitations to the honored guests.

Our stockman fattened the piglets to ensure that there would be thick layers of fat on every cut of meat roasted. The resident artist, who was also our tutor, painted many poems in classic Nom characters on long cuts of red banner cloth. The guards spent days polishing the arrays of altar brassworks, serving trays, ornamental relics, giant candleholders of six-foot-tall brass storks, and the whole decorative brass armory. And every night after supper, all the staff and the adult residents of the estate, including the magistrate and his wife, sat down with piles of bamboo sticks, colored papers, paint, glue, and twine. Over tea, sweets, and tall tales told beneath a waxing moon, they practiced the traditional art of lantern making. On Mid-Autumn Night, every child would have a beautiful lantern for the moonlight parade.

On Mid-Autumn Day, important guests started arriving for the festival in the afternoon. My cousin Tan and I came out to the Ancestral Gate to watch them. It was a fine sight. We had never seen so many new faces. The wealthiest came in horse-drawn carriages. High-ranked officials from the old warlord lines rode horses and wore mandarin robes and slacks. Each had a retinue of two to four guards and banner bearers. Local visitors, often of more moderate wealth, traveled in wood palanquins with silk canopies carried by liveried men. Distinguished scholars and elders of modest means came in man-pulled rickshaws. None of stature passed through the Ancestral Gate on foot.

Villagers arrived in droves, coming through the rear gate. They found their way to the courtyard, sat on mats laid on the paved bricks, and helped themselves to tea and sweets from the kitchen. In the grand hall, people congregated to play Chinese chess and cards—the men with men, the women with women. Men stood around, chatting and swaggering with the confidence of farmers after a good harvest and a new promising crop already in the fields. Mid-autumn was the season of indolence; all the hard work of planting was long finished and there was nothing to do except watch the seedlings grow.

People sorted themselves into parties befitting their stations. Folks of equal wealth sat on the same straw mat. Even then, families of similar status stayed near each other. It was a world where titles, however minor, mattered. A man’s social station determined everything, from whom he may wed to which school his children may attend. It determined where a person sat, when he spoke, the manner in which he addressed others, and even how large a share of a public feast he took home. It was a harsh world where people relied on the rigid order of the centuries.

A hush rolled across the dining hall as the magistrate and his wife made their entrance. Uncle Thuan was a stocky man of average height with a dark, broad face, a boxy jaw, and a prominent forehead. He was built in the image of his line—men who knew both the plow and the sword; wide-beamed shoulders, meaty hands, and nut-brown skin, though his bearing was of someone born into wealth, who knew from his earliest youth that he was destined to rule. He eschewed Western trappings, displayed no pocket watches or rings, and refused to wear European suits even when he went to the Province Seat on official business. He kept his hair long in the traditional topknot tucked inside a formal headdress. His attire rarely varied from what he wore today: sandals, white trousers beneath a mandarin robe of black silk, the ivory insignia of his office pinned on his chest.

Aunt Thuan, the mistress of the estate, was in her late twenties. The well-bred daughter of a wealthy merchant family, she was tall and her slimness made her seem even taller when she stood next to her stocky husband. She wore black slacks beneath the traditional
ao tu than
—a modest silk gown of four colors, cinched by a sash around the waist. Her glossy black hair was wrapped in a tight coil and piled above her head, encircled by a velvet headdress. She was a classic beauty in that she had all the prized features: pearly white skin, oval face, full red lips, and slanted almond eyes. Men said she was the most beautiful woman in the province. Women were envious. They claimed that her full lips were a sign of wanton sexual desire; that the slant of her eyes indicated a mean spirit; and that her high cheekbones were a bad sign for her husband’s longevity.

None of this touched her, for she was a supremely confident woman. Although she was the third wife, wedded after the death of the magistrate’s first wife, she had proven to be a very efficient and sharp-minded administrator, so capable that she immediately stepped over the second wife and assumed the role of mistress of the estate.

She accompanied her husband as he made the rounds to greet their extended families and then she quickly retreated to oversee the festivities while he continued through the hall from one group to another, and then out to the courtyard to greet his guests. The whole village had turned out for the festival. People sipped tea and sat patiently, waiting for the magistrate to complete his rounds. The meal would not commence until all were properly received.

Concluding the welcoming ceremony, Uncle climbed to the top step of the Ancestral Temple and looked down at the courtyard packed with diners sitting on mats, children darting about, folks circulating, greeting and congratulating each other. Council elders, dignitaries, and honored guests, more than a hundred strong, quietly rose from their tea-mats and aligned themselves in suitable rank behind him, the highest standing in the front row closest to the magistrate. People simply knew the proper thing to do; the gestures of ritual were instinctive.

Hands clasped behind his back, Uncle waited for the crowd to hush. He did not need to be announced; after all, the entire village revolved around him. Its entire population worked, had commerce with the estate, or served others who did. In one capacity or another, he was the judge, jury, sheriff, moneylender, landlord, and patron for all present, and this endowed him with a sort of compelling gravity, more so because he took pleasure in the drama of having people wait on him. In moments, the din subsided and all eyes turned to him.

“Honored guests, family, and friends, it gives me great pleasure to see you all here to celebrate this most auspicious Mid-Autumn Festival with us. We thank you for honoring our house with your company. We wish you all good health and good fortune. Let us feast.”

While the foods served to the commoners were not as glamorous as those served at the magistrate’s wedding banquet, the board was well laid with popular country dishes: roasted chickens, rice noodles brushed with scallion oil, poached fish, sweetmeat dumplings, cured hams, spring rolls, bean curd stuffed with minced pork, stir-fried vegetables, shrimp cakes, fresh herbs, pickled radishes, and dipping sauces. One of the favorite entrees was the crunchy-skin piglets, roasted and rubbed with five spices. But the most anticipated course was
bo thui,
an appetizer of cold cuts of veal served with a thick brown sauce of fermented soybean and mashed sweet rice. It was a delicacy most folks enjoyed perhaps only once a year at a major village banquet. The calf had to be slow-roasted whole over an open wood flame so that the hide turned a yellowish gold and the shoulder, when cut, revealed a thin layer of rare meat at the bone, a thick band of pink meat, and a slender well-done strip near the hide. Finely sliced, the meat’s tenderness was heightened by a single chewy, smoky strand of hide.

Within the Ancestral Temple, servants provided the same meal to fifty of the most powerful and wealthy men in the province. The men spread themselves out according to status among the five dining mats. In the adjacent room, their wives took similar positions beside the magistrate’s wife in accordance with the rank of their husbands. Diners sat in the lotus position with the rear hems of their robes draped over their laps, and ate from the communal tray using chop-sticks and small bowls.

For these guests, the magistrate had prepared an additional delicacy, the house’s stork stew, a recipe refined over four generations since his great-grandfather planted the bamboo hedge around the estate. Strong winds often dashed storks into the hedge, breaking their wings and crippling them. At first, the birds were killed as acts of mercy and eaten so as not be wasteful. Over the years, the cooks discovered that young stork meat was exceptionally appetizing when first pit-roasted and then slow-cooked in clay crocks with wild mushrooms, lotus seeds, rice wine, soy sauce, and the tender noodle-like baby bamboo shoots grown in inverted pots. It was served only at special occasions because storks were graceful creatures. The claypot stork, as it was called, became the famed heirloom dish reserved for honored guests.

After the feast, Mother and Aunties went into the kitchen to supervise the cooks in the massive task of wrapping hundreds of quartered sections of pork, meat cakes, fruits, and sweet rice in banana leaves. Every guest would receive a proper share of the feast at the end of the night. The most important guests would receive a whole piglet head, a tail, and slices of the neck meat. The next group would receive half a pig’s head and half a tail. The middle tier would have a slice of the piglet’s neck meat, and so on down the hierarchy. The list would be checked and re-checked. A mix-up with the bamboo baskets would be disastrous. People bought titles and positions mainly for these honors and privileges, so the gifts were tokens of a person’s public stature.

In the courtyard, Aunt Thao, my father’s younger sister, who was in her twenties and unmarried, gathered us children to watch the theater troupe perform the dragon dance. Above, the sun was slipping behind the bamboo hedge, leaving a pink moon to climb a honeyed sky. In the evening glow, the courtyard looked reddish and warm like freshly baked bricks. A breeze sighed from the wetland. A thicket of sparrows swooped, whipping, and diving dizzily in the lowering dusk. The gardeners began lighting the estate’s vast array of shadow lanterns, each the size of a barrel. As if by a silent agreement, guests took flames from the incense braziers and began lighting the hundreds of lanterns strung throughout the grounds. The glow spread outward from the main courtyard like a breath, illuminating the buildings, the rosebushes, the hedges, the picnic lawn, the pond, the swimming pier, the winding footpaths leading to the four corners of the estate.

At once little boys and girls scattered like fireflies, each carrying a special paper lantern shaped like a star, sailing ship, snail, globe, horse, deer, or rabbit. There were fat carps with gaping mouths, eagles with flapping wings, and stars with spinning arms. We ran, skipped, and paraded our gorgeous, glowing ornaments until the candles burned out. Then, suddenly, over the pond by the rose garden, fireworks exploded, drawing multicolored blooms of sizzling sparks. Curly tails, starbursts, and poppy comets zipped, screamed, and buzzed across the night sky, and then mushroomed into pure rainbow light, blotting out the stars.

Honored guests gathered on divans and gazed at the moon. Servants brought out hot jasmine tea and trays of moon cakes. There were two types: chewy lotus cakes and flaky-crust cakes, both palm-size squares stuffed with a marvelous variety of fillings. People cut them into small morsels for sharing and spent the evening sipping tea and sampling the medley of fillings: sweetmeats, salted eggs, nuts, lotus seed paste, red bean, mung bean pudding, and candied fruits.