The Lotus and the Storm (2 page)

“Do you understand?” she asks with a proprietorial gaze. She wants me to love what she loves. Stars, especially. She shows me a picture of Van Gogh's
Starry Night
. She sees motion in the brushstrokes, swirling patterns of subatomic particles beneath the appearance of solid mass.

I nod. I understand. I wish for my own personal planet. For a genie to grant me my every wish.

When I confide my wishes, she says with a show of exaggerated exasperation, “What an imagination you have, little one.”

In the kitchen, we prepare a smorgasbord of delicacies. We practice eating a well-known Swedish specialty—
surströmming,
fermented canned herring. My sister has researched the ritual. It cannot be performed indoors. We go to the open-air terrace. She ties a cloth napkin around the tin can, places it on the table, and opens it. The cloth is not included to create an aura of formality but rather to soak up the liquid that spurts from the can due to pressure built up during fermentation. The can, bulging with gas, hisses. We wait for a strong smell to be released. My sister scoops the herring from the briny liquid and spreads it on paper-thin hard bread. We each take a bite. I swallow mine quickly without chewing, pretending it is no more stinky than our traditional nuoc mam sauce of fermented anchovies.

My sister wants to acquire this taste. The Nobel Prize is given in Sweden and she has many ways to prepare for this heroic future awaiting her. Already she is graceful. There is an eloquent flex, an arch to each foot as she positions one lightly in front of the other; she is on a stool, her stage, to deliver her acceptance speech. I stand sheltered, next to her. Ours is a world of mathematical grace. It is alive with possibilities. I lean into Khanh's body as if the enormous resolve inside her were solid mass.

 • • • 

Hours later, we eat dinner with our Chinese grandmother, who has been with our family since my sister was born. She comes from a family of Chinese traders and speaks fluent Vietnamese.

She is wearing her usual tunic and trousers. Her hair is tightly coiled and held together by pins. We call her Grandma when we talk to her. When we talk about her to others, we call her our Chinese grandma or our Chinese grandmother. Our real grandmother lives in Saigon, not far from our house, although we rarely see her.

We swirl about the trees and grass, raising ourselves ecstatically skyward, diving with winged arms like planes dodging rocket fire. We take turns. We taxi and take off, swoop and swerve. Our Chinese grandmother grows impatient. A crease of disapproval lines her bark-colored face.

She wipes her mouth with her upper arm and grunts. “Is it possible for the two of you to stop moving and sit down to eat?” she asks as she clops down the garden path in pursuit of us. When she's excited, a Chinese cadence is unloosed into her Vietnamese, giving it a peculiarly choppy rhythm.

My sister smiles. I hear a giggle as she speeds up and vibrates her wings. I too am flying and doing clever aerial turns. I know our Chinese grandmother wants us to hurry. She wants us to be on schedule. Eat, play (a little bit), then sleep. Once we fall asleep, she will be able to settle, at last, into her nighttime routine of betel nut chewing and reading.

“Stop and eat. Chew. Swallow. Have I not taught you manners?”

She is not pleased that we have developed a habit of bunching our food in the back of our mouths. I want to accommodate our grandma's demands but I do not want to antagonize my sister.

“Don't walk away and ignore me when I'm talking to you,” our Chinese grandmother says, enunciating each word.

My sister walks away and ignores her. I too take a few steps before turning back to look. We get no more than a few meters down the garden path before we are collared.

“Huh,” she says, satisfied with her success.

I stand still, to let her know I have succumbed. My sister twists herself loose but then stops and smiles.

“Grandma,” my sister pleads. “I am sorry. I want to make up.”

There is only silence.

“We will sit still and eat, I promise.”

To demonstrate, my sister sets herself on a rock and does not move.

Immediately our Chinese grandmother responds. She can be placated with the right move. “All right then. You can sit right . . .”

“But we will need to have some Coca-Cola,” my sister says sweetly. “Please?”

Our mother doesn't allow us to drink soda pop, but once in a while our Chinese grandma rewards our good behavior with a few sips of Coke.

Today my sister is trying a new experiment. She is asking for the drink in exchange for good behavior that has yet to come.

Perhaps because she is exhausted, our Chinese grandmother consents.

I am astonished. Khanh runs to the kitchen, finds a bottle, and takes a good, long draw. Her face is radiant.

We quickly finish eating and then return to the task of piloting our planes. As we hover in the air and look down, making sputtering sounds with our mouths, the rice fields below are alive and voluptuous, a glorious green. We take care to avoid the rain-collecting cistern that sits squarely against our wall, positioned just so to be gravity fed, its open mouth ready to intercept the rainwater that flows off our roof. Our mother harvests the rain and redirects it for our garden. During the monsoon season, she puts out an additional four or five cisterns under the eaves of our house. When they are empty, my sister and I use them for games of hide-and-seek.

I lift the lid and dip my hand into the cistern, spraying my sister with water. We run out the front door with Grandma in tow. “Not so fast,” she says. Her face is brown and weathered. She can be crotchety if challenged. She is bestowed a degree of authority over us but doesn't possess any intrinsic authority of her own. Khanh and I listen to her, but only enough so that she does not complain about us to our mother. Grandma sighs at our impudence. I glance nervously at Khanh who is busy placating her.

“We're very careful,” my sister says, glancing back to give our Chinese grandmother a compliant nod.

We do not want to lose time. We are in a hurry. Khanh and I head straight to the front gate, make a right turn, and race down our block, Ngo Quyen Street, named after a Vietnamese general who decisively defeated the Chinese in the tenth century and declared Vietnam's independence after one thousand years of Chinese rule. Our street is lined with tamarind trees. Tamarind pods, fully ripe and plump, lie scattered about. Their shells are dry and brittle. I pocket a few to crack open later. With a sprinkling of sugar, their brown juicy pulp, normally acidic, becomes sweet and tangy.

We walk by an ornate moss-covered tomb, its stone marker engraved with Chinese calligraphy. The tomb is in our neighbor's garden a few houses down from ours, and although it is not his ancestral tomb, he is reluctant to remove it for fear that something bad might result from dislodging ancient spirits. We turn left into a side street with Khanh leading the way. I am learning how to snap my fingers. We snap our fingers in unison as if in doing so we button our parts together to make a corresponding whole.

As usual, we are hoping to find the American soldiers who gather every day in and around the South Vietnamese military police compound, a modular building with a roof made of galvanized iron sheets. A guard-duty station stands at a corner, and as we round it, the Rolling Stones thump “Tell Me” accompanied by a strong slide guitar and driving bass. We are surrounded by coils of concertina wire. Because the South Vietnamese military police is headquartered here, this is a secure and well-guarded street, always patrolled by soldiers.

It isn't long before James Baker catches sight of us. James is our special friend. He is an American serviceman whom we often see with the South Vietnamese units at the military compound. We found him about a year ago when we followed the thumping bass line and the squeal and transport of electric guitars emanating from his portable cassette player. We were coming home from school. My sister, running after the music, caught up with him, tugged at his shirt, and grinned. “Mick. Mick Jagger.” He pointed to the music box and winked.

“We love it,” my sister said, speaking for herself and me. We didn't want delicacy. We wanted the big sound of rock and roll. James turned the volume up and offered us two sticks of Wrigley's gum.

We have learned his routine. We know when he is off duty.

“We're here,” he says when he sees us this evening. “Me and the Rolling Stones.” My sister beams. James is eager to show off his liquid moves. There is no getting around the music. It pulls you into its center, coaxes you to take leave of the ordinary world. There, in the midst of the acoustic guitars and bass drums, is a new kind of sound, loud and enormous enough to assault and liberate at the same time. You can feel it up your spine. James throws more music on the turntable. It erupts with life, snaps and crackles with a bigger and bigger bang. Grandma grimaces. I jump into the shrill, raucous rumble as the music rises. James strips down to his white undershirt and begins to shift his feet, sway his body. His back is long and lean. He reaches for Khanh and me and swings us each a half-turn. The three of us hold hands by hooking fingers. Our private ritual.

Rock and roll has its way of gathering momentum, of transcending barriers and demanding acquiescence even in this smoldering heat. We watch James, his James-ness, as he shakes his shoulders and lowers his body to the drum's beat, lower, lower, lower, until he is squatting against pronounced resistance on his haunches, the Vietnamese way.

James had told us about his family. His parents come from a long line of potato farmers in a place he calls the East End. I imagine the same flatness of farmland we have here, absorbing the same iridescent green, extending infinitely from plot to plot. He likes to tell us about his two-story clapboard house sitting on a flat field overlooking the Long Island Sound. That is where he played soccer. The game the entire world loves, James calls it. We nod in agreement.

I look at his distinctive chin, the way he thrusts it outward, the way the dimple dances when he moves. A low growl rumbles from the record player. We are all still caught inside its grip. I see Grandma out of the corner of my eye. She shakes her head. She likes James but she does not like his music.

“It's time to go home,” she declares.

We protest; we have barely arrived. Khanh picks up an album cover and studies it. The singers have long hair and stare sulkily into space.

“Don't ignore me when I'm talking to you,” Grandma says.

Khanh keeps her eyes on the album cover. She feels the drum's beat underfoot. I see the pursed lips, the palpable defiance. Her hair, knotted and tangled, is plastered in sweat.

“Do you hear me?” Grandma asks. “You still have homework to do and it is almost your bedtime.” A definite Chinese-ness has insinuated itself into her Vietnamese.

Khanh pretends sudden interest in her watch, doing quick multiplications and divisions with the numbers, a stalling tactic. She shoots our grandma an imperious look, juts out her jaw defiantly. Grandma scowls. James prudently intercedes.

“One more song,” he says cordially. A perfect voice, soft and melancholy, fills the air. “Yesterday, ” sung with aching abandon. Grandma, becalmed but still petulant, begins to relax. The hardness she affects is usually short-lived. Most of the time she can be jostled out of it. She allows herself to enter Paul's loose, liquid voice. I slip into her arms and stay there while the Beatles sing.

James winks. Despite her outward displeasure, Grandma is inclined to indulge him. His weekly volunteer work at the orphanage in the neighborhood behind our house gives him a gravitas that his youth alone does not. James often buys chocolate and gum from the American PX and hands it out to the children there.

“He is a nice young man,” Grandma often says with an intonation meant to convey not just affection but also admiration.

James pulls a camera from his knapsack and fiddles with it. He aims it at us and maneuvers the lens into focus. “Just point and shoot,” he says, then mimics what he wants to convey by pushing his index finger toward the camera's button. He hands it to our Chinese grandmother and asks her to snap a photo of him and my sister and me. So that the camera's lens will take me in and I will not be cut from the picture's edges, I lean as deeply as I can into my sister and James.

Our Chinese grandmother looks through the viewfinder and pushes. I hear a click. The shutter is released. James tells her he is sure the photo will be just fine.

MR. MINH, 2006, 1963

I
wake from a long night's sleep to discover that it snowed heavily overnight. Wind has blown a swell of snow onto my windowsill. The shimmering expanse of white covering the grass reflects the sun's glare. Roofs, trees, cars—everything is covered in snow. Beyond them, against a stretch of acquisitive white, a steeple dances in the mist. A pure silvery world has been created, separate from the world of yesterday.

Once I used to wish for the infinite beauty of a snowfall. As a child in Saigon, I read about it, the wind-whipped powder, the geometric flakes, tree branches sheathed in white. So different from the tropical swelter I was born into.

Virginia is not a state that gets heavy snow. Cars stall or slip aimlessly in the whisper of frost. Those who do not dare to wander out will stand by their windows to watch the snow lash soundlessly toward them.

The clock on my bedside table shows that it is still early morning, but in this weather, my daughter might already have left for work. I run my thumb over the tips of my fingers, shriveled in the cold. I exhale and watch the uneasy vapor drift. Reflexively, I touch the familiar patch of abdominal scar tissue. How long ago that was, that dark rainy night when I parachuted into enemy territory, crawled through black earth crowded with underbrush of thorn and thistle and rotting trees. The wound on my stomach had turned necrotic and I had no antibiotics. The medical kit was lost in the storm that downed the helicopter. I knew how to improvise. Luckily, a swarm of flies was buzzing about, attracted to decayed flesh. I dropped to my knees, unbuttoned my shirt, and proffered my wound to them. The next day the bandaged area teemed with an infestation of maggots. I kept it covered up, checking only once in the morning to make sure the maggots were eating abscessed tissue, not healthy pink flesh. I could feel them wriggle and swarm. The stench of blood lingered, refusing to be fanned away.

What I need is a lighter tread into the past. I take in a deep breath.

I am what you can call lean. One American neighbor in this building sometimes calls me Bob. His American mouth, the muscles of his tongue, cannot form the sort of sounds that our Vietnamese names demand. Neither my first nor my last name starts with a
B
. So I know Bob is not a pun on my real name. Of course I eventually figure it out. Bag of bones. He means it affectionately, I think.

I touch the skeletal outline of my body, its softness, its diminishing musculature. It is hard to eat prepackaged convenience food—Jell-O, hard-boiled eggs, toast. Once your tongue has known a more belligerent, embellished flavor, it yearns for what it once had. Cloves, cinnamon, peppercorn, ginger, fennel. I crave the pinch of five-spice powder that blends sour with sweet, bitter with savory and salty, the many-layered coatings of
char siu
seasonings on pork that turn the meat a dark lurid red, burned and charred along the edges, tender in the middle. The sweetness of honey, the sharp bite of salt. Their aromatic dust drifts about, teasing, winking for memory's sake in this subdued January light.

Against the wall opposite my bed is a sideboard with a television set and a row of photographs. I stare at the one of a little girl with wide inquisitive eyes, long black lashes, black hair that curls and loops. She must have been six when the picture was taken. I close my eyes. I remember when I first felt the kicking of her foot against her mother's rib cage. I see her as she came out of the womb, to the sound of prayers accompanying her birth, with a tuft of spiky black hair on her newborn head. She is still connected to her mother by an umbilical cord. Her skin is warm, suffused with heat from her mother's body.

After all these years, let me say who I am still: a father. A husband also. I call up lines from a poem by one of France's most romantic poets, Alfred de Musset. “
The first love, and the tenderest; / Do you remember or forget—
/ Ah me, for I remember yet.”

Surely, I remember yet. Here, in this room I am inside the rattle and rush of history. I remember “La Nuit de Mai,” that beautiful poem dedicated to Alfred's doomed love affair with George Sand, the woman he lost but never forgot.

In another photograph, next to the one of my little daughter, a young woman looks back at me, her neck long and slender, her face slightly tilted, as if in contemplation. This is how I remember her, as she was when we first met. She is here, but not.

If we are fortunate, all of us find, at some point in our lives, the one special person for whom everything is possible, for whom love itself rearranges one's entire being. That is how it all begins. My wife, Quy, was that person for me. I am still there with her.

I am reminded of the quiet, inward beauty of yin, a feminine, peaceful acceptance that is but the other side of yang. I lie back to enjoy the whisper of falling snow. There it is, a strange beauty, equal parts loneliness and equal parts poetry. I watch the translucent specks and imagine their desire to let go and drift carelessly toward the earth. Here is the irresistible compulsion to float and fall.

A muffled groan lodges itself inside my chest, followed by a series of fitful coughs. Pert footsteps stop at my bedroom door. My child? Yes, though not a child any longer, of course. A grown woman who must get to the office in the snow. I see the faint creases on her face, creases that deepen when she is deep in thought.

“Mai?” I ask tentatively.

She nods. I smile. She can be sweet and caring, if on occasion distant. We do not always speak to each other in our language. Sometimes it is easier to speak a new language. Dispensing with normal courtesy—How are you? How do you feel today?—she comes straight over to inspect me. With a certain theatricality, she rolls up my shirtsleeve and peeks at my upper arm. Revealed thus, I can see my own true unprosperous thinness. As if in grief, there it is. The dull, mottled skin. The angular wrist. The brittleness of bones. The ache inside.

“It is better,” she announces reassuringly, working her hand around my neck to prop me up.

What is better? And then I remember. Sometime, a few days before, perhaps, I had fallen and scraped a patch of skin from my arm. A searing pain registered through my arthritic joint. A tingling feeling radiated from my nerves. I can still hear the hushed chorus.

It could have been serious. An old person's broken tissue can easily become ulcerated.

A punctilious vigil was maintained. Mai paid the Korean housewife in the ground-floor apartment to watch over me while she worked and when Mrs. An could not be here. I cooperate. It is important in a place like this to be pleasant. Nothing happens here that is not noticed.

Mai and I live in an apartment in Sleepy Hollow Manor, a small complex housing an amalgam of transplants displaced and dislocated from the world over. In the evenings, I hear the clash and clangor of Hindi and Tagalog, Korean and Chinese, and of course the familiar and comforting elocution of southern Vietnamese. Much of life spills forth and is conducted outdoors here. Pleasantries and gossip as well as business exchanges and proposals are discussed in the front yard and back garden, on sidewalks and stoops. Women in saris may work as receptionists or nurses during the day but after hours they double as gold merchants or moneylenders willing to finance under-the-table businesses for the ambitious—ticket scalping, catering, hairdressing, marriage brokering. At Sleepy Hollow Manor, New World ingenuity combines with Old World desires and networks to spin a furtive, anarchist version of the American Dream.

Still, no one here knows how things were for me. Years ago, my now-crooked fingers were made to perform wondrous feats. Through these fingers ropes and cords were passed through tangles and loops and emerged as knots that came with names: the double Blackwall hitch, fisherman's bend, Turk's head, cat's paw. It was all part of the training. We rehearsed every contingency while blindfolded. Cyanide pills were sewn inside shirtsleeves and trouser hems. I practiced the motion with my hands tied. Body curled forward to receive the end to suffering, I bit open the seams. The pills would be within tongue's reach if a mission failed. I could swallow death.

It is almost eight in the morning, but the light is beginning to darken under the weight of hanging clouds.

Mai seems shaky, perhaps because she dreads having to drive in this weather. She searches for her handbag, a huge leather pocketbook that contains her wallet, books, papers, and other miscellaneous items that she often cannot find because they are buried at the bottom.

“Your cell phone is over there.” I point to the chest of drawers by the door. “Where you left it last night.”

“Thank you,” she says. She picks it up and starts thumbing messages on the tiny keyboard. She usually sticks it in the back pocket of her pants but I notice that these trousers have no pockets.

There is the sound of a key jiggling in the lock. “Hello, hello,” a voice calls from the threshold.

It is Mrs. An. The high cheekbones, knife-blade sharp, make her stand out in any setting. She has been in this country almost as long as I have but, unlike me, she escaped by boat after the war. She still dresses conspicuously native, in silk shirts and sparkling gold threads. She is rather slender, but she knows how to position her body for leverage and can lift me with one hand. She floats my way and wedges a pillow behind my back, exuding benevolence. I have known her for decades and am comfortable speaking my language with her. It is lucky that she lives with her family on the same floor, only two doors down from us.

“I'm sorry I'm here so early, but I am on my way to work earlier than usual. I'm worried the road will turn icy,” Mrs. An explains. She sputters. When she feels overwhelmed, her facial muscles pull. I watch the left half of her face dance upward. She pushes her palm against it as if to press it into submission. “Argghh,” she lets out a fierce sigh. The tick continues, up, down, sideways. She is losing patience with its incalcitrance.

“Oh, good, you are still here!” she exclaims when she sees Mai.

Mai nods.

Looking at my daughter, I can sense the mass of unarticulated feelings hovering about her. She is small-boned, almost deceptively delicate, her skin smooth and supple. Her thick hair falls in sheets and shines in almost lacquered blackness. Her eyes are charcoal black, like the seed of a longan. I fed longans long ago to my daughters. Dragon eye, literally. The fruit is round with a thin, brown shell. Its flesh, white, soft, and juicy, surrounds a large black seed.

Mrs. An cranes her neck and looks toward the kitchen, checking to see if there is food on the counter for me. She manages a derisive laugh when I ask her who is working the shift with her today. “The young ones won't bother to get out of bed on a day like this.” She sulks, though with a discernible degree of satisfaction. “The nursing home has a lot of trouble finding reliable aides.”

She and Mai give me my meals on most days, although I can manage by myself more than they believe. She is the one who noticed my swollen feet and hands and worried about my ability to breathe. A month ago, at the hospital, they removed one gallon of water from my lungs. Even now my breath comes out in serrated gasps like a fish out of water. I close my eyes, separating myself from my physical body.

“It's all right, Aunt An, I can stay home awhile,” Mai says. “I am not going in for another two hours.” Mrs. An is not really her aunt. It is simply the Vietnamese way of bringing close friends into the family fold.

Mrs. An nods. A long effervescent hiss comes out of the coiled pipes.

I glance at the basket on the credenza. There is a plate of sticky rice, dried shrimp, and Chinese sausage. A bag of persimmons, unskinned. I also smell simmered catfish and rice, even though both are in a tight-lidded stainless steel tiffin box. There are four canisters stacked one on top of the other, held together by latches and fitted into a metal frame with handles on top. Each box contains a different treat.

Mai subscribes to what we traditionally call
com thang,
monthly rice. Her subscription entitles her to home-cooked Vietnamese food made by two women who have over the years developed a steadfast following. We now dine on whatever the two women choose to prepare and deliver each day.

They typically bring comfort foods. Fried vermicelli; catfish caramelized in soy sauce, fish sauce, and melted sugar; potbellied tomatoes stuffed with minced pork and onions; a clear broth soup that is so delicate it tastes more like tea than soup; eggs scrambled with bitter melon. Today there is also a thermos of tea and sticky rice.

Although I can do it myself, Mai feeds me, scooping the sticky rice from the plate with her fingers and rolling it into a ball. I open my mouth and swallow what she slips into me. Time floats, then curls and curves backward into itself. Coaxed by the lure of memory, my mind drifts into an imagined world from years past. The distant chant of an itinerant peddler hawking food swims in my ears. Tamarind pods fall on the misshapen sidewalks, cracked open by the Saigon heat.

I shake my head, almost too violently. Saigon still wraps itself around me and squeezes with sudden force.

Mai turns on the television. A weather map shows precipitation remaining in our area, which, combined with the cold temperature, is certain to mean more snow. I see arrows and lines and a shaded spectrum of pink and red that looks almost ornamental.

“Are you cold?” she asks as she hands me a tissue for my runny nose. Her narrow shoulders slope inward, giving her a meek, seemingly serene appearance, but I know better. Poor child, I think. Memories course through both of us and sometimes they short-circuit inside her. My hand trembles as I try to protectively clasp hers.

I nod. “This is so good. I love that you order this food. Remember how your sister loved caramel pork?”

Her face darkens but she gives me a tentative smile and offers me a cup of tea poured from the thermos. The thick, smoky flavor of a full-bodied black tea rises. She tilts the cup at just the angle that makes the flow manageable. I am touched by her tenderness.