The Lotus and the Storm (34 page)

Years are missing from our lives even as we live them.

I try to erase from my memory that day when Father and I left without her.

 • • • 

We hear a bit of this and that about her from the gathering of Vietnamese in our area. A community is being built here. We know what we are. We are the barnacles of a lost war, struggling against disdain, and here we are day by day building this cloistered niche for ourselves and filling it with improvised charm. One shop opens, one restaurant, then another and another, each dedicated to the sensual cues of memories, the mouth-savoring tastes of a time past. The enclave owes its accoutrements to the real Saigon itself. It owes its very soul to the indulgence of memory. What we yearn for is an element of the commonplace and so it is the commonplace and its lesser emblems that are resurrected here. The walls are painted rice-field green. The air is permeated with the distinctive scent of spices. Loudspeakers play mournful music about love lost, its notes and chords pulling sadness from the air. As more of us congregate in the area, there is comfort in the reiteration of our replicated past, in the regresses of our memories and the pretense of normality. We are eager to be neurally tripped. We wish to trick our brains into believing we are still in Vietnam. Here in this little community forged by fate and circumstance, there are shops that cater to the flavors of Hue, Saigon, Hanoi, returning us to the simple assertion of first loves and other essentials.

History is pacified. War's indecencies are tamed. Day by day, like a recurring dream, a little Saigon is willed into reality.

There is an almost daily arrival of Vietnamese leaving their one-year, two-year lives with their American sponsors to join this little community. With them come fragments of Mother's story. There are inconsistencies that Father cannot make sense of. How much is pure fabrication and how much is truth, we do not know.

Within a few months, the new government took steps to ensure the irrelevance of wealth by decreeing that everyone would start out as equals in the post-1975 world. The old currency would be invalid effective immediately. Inequalities would be razed and everyone would be given two hundred dong to start a new life, even if jobs could not be had or could be had only if you could afford to pay a steep bribe.

The neighbor telling Father the story becomes increasingly perturbed as he recounts his ordeals. His hand gestures assume attitudes of anger and unrest. Call him Uncle, Father directs me. We are becoming familiar to each other so a new appellation is required. To his grave discredit, Uncle Somebody was a well-to-do owner of a popular restaurant in Cholon. He and Father become immediate friends. Uncle drones on, bitterly. When excited he pauses to spit, his horrible, angry spittle sometimes hanging by a thread from the corner of his mouth. I turn away but Father is too preoccupied to care. He listens instead. Houses were confiscated and subdivided if they were deemed unnecessarily large.

A Communist Party commissar took over our house for himself and his family within the first few weeks. But your mother was fine, the neighbor quickly assures me. She was not alone. She moved in with a Vietcong relative. Of course, Uncle Number Five. Father nods, as if that were to be expected. Her Vietcong brother will protect her, Father assures me. Others connected to the South would not be so fortunate. Soldiers of the old, defeated army were sent to reeducation camps to languish and die.

I was not there to see our mother leave our house and make her way to join her brother. But I have in my head an imagined memory of this moment. She is there in her purple
ao dai,
under the shade of a tamarind bough, closing our front door with finality and walking away from the place that had housed us all.

Father keeps repeating that having a brother who was a Vietcong will serve her well during these menacing times. Both his protective impulses and the integral power of his love are intact. He wants to put his arms around Mother, knowing she is so easily wounded.

 • • • 

They are called the boat people. It is because they flee from Vietnam's coast by boat. Their very essence is aptly distilled by two simple, sorrow-filled words.

It is 1978. The world is taking note of these people who willingly set their bodies upon the wide-open sea in the hope of reaching some distant, kindly shore. Coastal towns are increasingly depopulated because of this opportunity to escape.

In Little Saigon, our eyes behold the incandescent allure of ocean-blue spaces on a map of the world. Our relatives are leaving in droves, seeking some other place to call home. We know what the South China Sea is like with its mahogany blackness and its sinister, palpitating presence. We absorb these physical facts with our entire bodies, not just with our eyes or our heads. I imagine the silence of the water as it gathers strength, the spectral mass underneath the calm that creates turbulence and capsizes boats. Following the wandering threads on water are months and months in Malaysian, Thai, and Hong Kong camps and then an arrival, at last, as nature's elements onto the shores of a country willing to take them in for good and offer them its many possibilities. Somehow they leave behind the lost, the fallen, and the dead.

The boat people restore and comfort us. They bring news when they come, not the sort of news with hedges and qualifications that seeped out of the country after the foreign journalists were expelled, but real, firsthand news. Families here in Little Saigon wait for their arrival. The Chinese are fleeing in droves. With blunt naïveté, the new government has begun persecuting them, accusing them of undue economic dominance, treachery, and divided loyalties. Once again, as in Tet, it is Cholon that is at the epicenter of this upheaval.

I remember what our Vietcong uncle once told Mother. “The Chinese are seldom harmless.”

Of course Cholon will defy its oblivion.

The government claims punitively that the Chinese in Cholon—dubbed the Jews of Southeast Asia—are strangling the economy. One percent of the population controlling 80 percent of the food and textile industry and 100 percent of the wholesale trade. The Chinese will have to adopt Vietnamese nationality or they will be heavily taxed and their food rations reduced. Even those who already have Vietnamese citizenship are harassed.

This news inverts my childhood perspective. I can feel a sliver of memory move through me. I worry about our Chinese grandmother, Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist, Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller, stilled by the anxieties and jolts of their new lives and the slights that might have come or might yet be coming their way. It might already be impossible for them, skillful traders Mother admired. Private trade, wholesale, retail, large and small, is abolished by Party decree. Cholon, home of the Chinese, must be deflated, its commercial essence snuffed. In one of the coordinated raids on Cholon, thirty thousand police cordoned off the city and conducted searches, confiscating goods and valuables from fifty thousand retailers. Did they go through Ngo Quyen Street?

The Chinese are fleeing, along with Vietnamese of all stripes, including former soldiers, farmers, peasants, and traders, carrying nothing with them but hope and grievances.

We write letters to our mother and Chinese grandmother. We wait for letters to arrive from Cholon, even Saigon. People we know in Virginia are beginning to receive correspondence from Vietnam, sent first to France and then forwarded to America. Our neighbor, Uncle Somebody, whose name I couldn't recall so I nicknamed him “Somebody,” hands our father a smudged envelope he recently received from his wife, Mrs. An, postmarked Ho Chi Minh City. Inside is a circuitously worded letter containing mundane daily details, visits to the market, routines at their son's school, exaggerated declarations of their new and happy lives, and then the disguised news about the family's impending escape. They will be visiting her brother soon for a few days, the wife announces in the letter. The brother, Uncle Somebody explains, is already in California. He is choked with joy and fear.

Of course we continue sending letters whether or not we will receive replies in return. We are told by the newcomers to Little Saigon that the names of streets have been changed. Letters might be undelivered, lost. This is pure speculation. Still, every evening, Father inserts a small metallic key into the mailbox lock and, in a gesture saturated with meaning, sorts through the supermarket mailers and other junk mail. His voracious eyes fix on every envelope. It is a ritual in hope he engages in. No one will contradict him. No one will tell him there is no letter coming.

By 1978, more than half a million people have fled. Our neighbors, also former Saigon dwellers, join us for the evening news. I hear the usual musical passage that drumbeats the start of the program. Our visual and auditory cortexes are charged. Even in the narrative compression of five-minute sound bites, the sight of wrecked boats rammed onto a beachhead and human beings lurching in the water has pulled Vietnam again from the disinterested realm of background and anecdote into a central matter of concern.

Even during the height of the war, no one fled the country.

Father tells me that the South is a place where the language of commerce is spoken. It is a place of barter and trade, chaos and free-spiritedness. Southerners are a freewheeling, all-or-nothing lot. This explains the whooping, swerving Saigon traffic, he says, smiling. No Southerner can put up with the calamity economics of Communism, the so-called reeducation camps, or the austere grimness of the northern pall.

Of course I know what Father is secretly thinking when we walk the circumference of our apartment complex at night. The paved pathway is narrow and so he walks slightly ahead. From his gait I know he is thinking thoughts that leap and plunge. He is thinking that perhaps Mother will be among those on one of the boats that reach a foreign shore one of these days.

It is possible. Vietnam's entire length hugs the coast of the South China Sea. Coves and inlets dot the southern tip of the country. Fishermen too are having trouble eking out a living because their properties have been seized and their catches taxed. Southerners are harassed simply because they are from the vanquished South. They will be willing to aim their dinghies seaward. Word has gotten out that a clandestine network organized by the Chinese has emerged. Southerners with gold pay the Chinese who in turn bribe government officials. Even as they denounce the Chinese, Communist functionaries are all too eager to accept their tarnished gold in private. Gold is favored above all other currencies. Our mother has gold in a safe. This is what he is thinking, and I am thinking the same.

BAO, 2006

I
am here, inside the tumult of air and wind that fills Mai's chest. I am still Bao, the storm, but for now I have calmed myself and I am just watching. The law firm is entangled in a criminal defense case that involves charges of racketeering, murder, and extortion. The client is alleged to be a mob figure who has infiltrated the music industry and his identity has thrown this prestigious and upscale firm into disequilibrium. This is a firm whose clients include large corporations, rich bankers, and chief executive officers who are occasionally charged with more palatable crimes such as insider trading or stock manipulation. The partner who heads up this racketeering case apparently accepted the client without going through the firm's usual vetting process. The team has been formed, and Mai is on it, along with three associates. They support David, the partner and senior rainmaker of the firm.

Mai is crisply dressed, in a skirt and blazer, a pin-striped suit cinched dramatically at the waist. Our private dramas and internal turbulence are hidden from view. Her hair, chin length, is parted to one side and swept neatly back. She is clear-skinned, wide-eyed, clear-headed, seemingly unaffected by the large-scale events that have defined our lives. That she can be so cool and calm enrages me. That she remains oblivious to my role enrages me even more. It is only because I have shielded her and saved her from feeling the pain of loss that she is able to stand here, showing off her fancy Americanized polish.

She is approaching David the partner with a wide smile glued on her face in the manner of a person who is meticulously in charge. He is in his midfifties and sports a thick, graying mustache that nicely frames his smile. He is known to be one of the more volatile partners. She has worked with him before. Under intense pressure to generate business, outmaneuver opponents, and score points, partners too work intense hours and are driven to extremes. They are permitted all manner of liberties, like barking and venting and generally being hostile and demanding for little or no reason.

But David is different with her. He likes her and doesn't issue orders. He finds her charming, precisely because she is so unreachable. Ambition, the cross and backbone of everyone here, has no claim on her. And hence he, the gatekeeper of career advancement, has none either. He knows enough about her prior life to realize that parts will remain impregnable. Over the years he has even developed a protectiveness toward her. He probes experimentally instead. Weekend work will be necessary to prepare for the upcoming trial. Their team is up against the federal government. There will be research pursued in blind alleys that will lead nowhere. Ambitious schemes will have to be concocted to exclude the evidence the government currently has against their client that has been gathered by wiretap. There are federal rules of evidence to research, such as the hearsay rule and its innumerable exceptions.

She reassures him, one arm on a jutting hip, that this work will be her priority. At the same time, she warns him with a spunky half-smile and a wink that he will not find her at the office night and day. I watch her haggle flirtatiously with him. “I'm not one of your precious associates you can overpay and overwork,” she chides. He is divorced and if she gives him a signal, he will eagerly demonstrate his interest in her. But she does not.

Once, he followed her into the library stacks and with her back against the books kissed her, or attempted to, his mouth briefly touching her throat as she swiftly spun her head away. I saw how he looked at her accentuated lips, the dent of flesh where a necklace had been worn. He struggled for composure and offered her an obliging smile as if to signal harmlessness but she refused to grace his action with any discernible response. Anything beyond that quick turn of the head, such as a push or a verbal reprimand, would have seemed like too much of a reaction that would in turn invite apologies. Instead, she knitted her brows and gave him a cool stare before maneuvering herself toward the narrow doorway. The incident was never spoken of.

He remains intrigued. He touches her whenever he can, her wrist, shoulder, or elbow. She is all possibility to him, only partially revealed and fully unfulfilled. He probably believes she is a daydreamer, her emotions full and ripe and ready to spill over. He does not know what I know. Mai lives her life in this country as if it were but a prelude to something more lasting that is not here yet and might never be.

I know he touches a sore point when he asks if she wishes to have a working dinner with him to go over the case. “Unless you have other plans,” he adds. She has no other plans. She knows that being by herself day after day is outside the realm of normalcy. But she stands there stolidly in the middle of the room rejecting his invitation. “Just a quick dinner,” he insists, slapping his hands together. They both know this has nothing to do with work. I listen while she emits a soft, single-syllabled “um” and then, with prim dismissal, tells him that she needs to go home. She does not even make up an excuse. She keeps up the barricade. Her blazer hangs on her arm. Her shoulders are exposed and catch his attention as she disappears into the elevator.

I watch as she considers carefully what she says or does not say. She listens to his account of their new case as if the matter were deeply personal to her. She has been at this firm for many years and she has seen the associates' accumulation of billable hours sweetly resolved into year-end bonuses and the possibility of partnership at the end of it all. She has taken herself outside the realm of this possibility, recognition, success, or partnership, and so can maintain an easy façade of calm.

And so this demeanor, and it is only a demeanor, of efficiency and self-advocacy is all the more incomprehensible to me. Does she think that her polish sets her apart from us? I see her becoming not American but simply un-Vietnamese, and the visual assertion of this process is enough to make her even more of a stranger to me. She is, by all outward appearances, standing guard against the trespasses of Vietnam, palms turned outward as if she were there to forestall our advances. True, she has made it here in America with bold forays into the unknown and a careful and precise mind. But she has done it completely unaware of what has happened within herself. She sees me as someone who lashes out. I am inside the dark recesses of her being. She does not know me. I am a mystery. She looks in the mirror and sees only my scowling and angry face. But she does not bother to reflect and ask the one obvious question—why?

I try to push on, observing her as she moves past offices and computer terminals, but I am unable to manage it. I am taken over instead by an echo of pleading voices. I know I can filigree my way through the brain's circuits. I can fake hope and trick my own feelings. “Mother, Mother,” I call. We call. We stay hidden in the jar. I shush Mai up. James falls. She blames me for his death.

Cecile too is agitated. She is the one who saw our sister collapse. I can feel her sobs, the sorry sounds coming from her chest.

Mai is still there, working on the LexisNexis terminal. She is stopping at irregular intervals to massage her temples as she tries to soothe the palpitations we have created inside her chest. I am like someone in the dark shadows looking at someone in the bright light. From my vantage point, I know every thought that scurries through her head and every feeling that she hides in her heart. She is perpetually perched on terror's precipice, fearful that I will break out and throw her into unconsciousness. She can feel the scurrying movements Cecile and I are making within the depths of her being.

Quickly she stands up. Over the years she has become better at the task of managing my and Cecile's discontents and disturbances. She works hard to forestall the onset of insanity associated with my appearance. Deep down I have no wish to do Mai harm. I try to cooperate. I try to save my outbursts for private times. I know we are in a public space, but as I watch her exaggerated display of Americanness, I am seized by uncontrollable rage. Still, I delay the onset of dark clouds and malicious storm. Instead, I thrash about for a long time inside her and thus give her sufficient warning to retreat to safety.

With each successive occurrence, the transit point that marks, to put it euphemistically, my entry into and exit from her world has become smoother. She knows I am about to push her into lost time. She rushes back to her office, locks the door, and with a sigh relinquishes herself and her consciousness to the forward and backward drift of our mutual lives.

 • • • 

Mai is home. Cecile is at the piano. The music she produces is beautiful, lush and prolonged inside the slow-moving dusk. It is music gorgeous enough to deflect all else. Here is beauty at last, in all its glory and raw intensity, briefly attained but somehow forever out of reach. It remains a mystery how she does it. She is playing Chopin but not quite. There is a faint disturbance in the air, a minuscule fragment of a sound, and then, suddenly, the music merely levitates effortlessly from the notes.

Our father exhales sighs of appreciation.

Sometimes it is like a mynah bird singing. The notes are held in its throat and then released. A beautiful birdsong emerges, elegiac in tone.

Sometimes it is like cupping the past in two hands and bringing it tenderly to the present. In her music, our essential life comes back in bursts the way a bush might explode in white blossoms one early spring morning.

I hang back and listen. Sometimes I try to pick up the notes and other times I just take the melody in.

She must be playing from memory. Our mother loved Chopin. So this is where Cecile goes to save herself, I think. So this is how the keyboard holds these hidden chords inside itself.

On those rare moments when Cecile emerges from Mai, she does so softly, melodiously, by playing the piano.

Unlike me, Cecile does not scowl and has no malice or wrath inside her. She is still an innocent. Her silhouette moves slightly. Outside, the long hanging branches of a sycamore also move. It is as if she were fully awake to life outside our louvered glass windows. It is as if she takes her cues from the old shade tree itself as it sways against the deep-churning rush of the wind.

It is her evening hour. She is alone at the piano, with our sister's heart in hers and a high-flying cascade of music inside her fingers. Mai has been redirected elsewhere. The transition is much smoother than when I elbow and bang my way out. It is as if she were merely sliding down the coiled shell, following the spiraling lines that mark its cylindrical shape. She meets no resistance. It is as if Mai knows that it is only little Cecile and she is willing to relinquish the space.

And so she is here, this evening, playing Chopin and keeping cadence. The world doesn't fall in tune with our internal currents, but we are making do under the daily strife. I can hear the music wind along the narrow Cholon roads into Ngo Quyen Street where it slows down and rests itself inside the purple dusk of the Old World.