The Lotus and the Storm (35 page)

MAI, 1977-1978

I
am in my last year of high school. We are still in Virginia, my father and I and a scattering of lives—Bao, Cecile, but mostly Bao—roiling about inside the depths of my being. I have done well, my grades not the result of brilliance but of merely workmanlike steadfastness. Today Father complains that he feels funny. It is early morning and we are both getting ready for the day. The school bus will be picking me up soon. The sight of Father slumped at the kitchen table, stilled by a strange sensation, stops me from running out the door. I go to him and put my hand on his back. His face has taken on the pallor of the haunted. He is not able to identify the sensation that plagues him beyond the one description that he keeps turning to, that he feels funny. Still, looking at his swollen eyes and puffy lids, I probe. What does
funny
mean, I ask. I want to know if there are physical symptoms. With a slow, ponderous intensity, Father proceeds to describe them. There is a phantom sensation on the left side of his body, starting from the heart and going down the rib cage to the hip. When did it start, I ask? He does not answer that question but mutters this instead: I am here, waiting for something to happen and I don't know what.

I ask him again when the funny feeling started. He tells me that he woke up two nights ago with a tightness in his throat. This very sensation has morphed into a feeling of numbness on the left side. He fumbles for an explanation. Here, he says, taking my finger and tracing it down the length of his body.

I know the feeling.

Is it a premonition, I ask, that might be producing the strange feeling? No, he replies petulantly, as if to dismiss this very unworthy thought as pure wrongheadedness. It's a physical sensation, he insists, a solid numbness that at times hardens. I don't suggest a doctor. He would refuse. I know his self-punishing beliefs about the need to endure quietly.

All through the day while I am at school, I think about the look on his gray-stubbled face as he left the house. In the morning's dusty light I saw that he has grown diminutive in his blue-gray uniform. His gaze was slightly off to the side of my face even as he bade me good-bye in the muted voice of someone who is losing hope. I cannot shake off that sad look in his eyes, the retreating gaze that seems to hold nothing.

Later in the evening, as I sit in the living room reading, I experience him by my side as if he were a blur. Can a person dissolve before one's very eyes, become out of focus because he is vanishing slowly into the dungeons of his own mind? He has nodded off to sleep on the sofa, cloaked in a pool of soft light. A book lies on his chest, opened and facedown. Reams of paper, some annotated, are scattered on the coffee table. I see his handwriting. Written in cursive, it is patrician and beautifully crafted, with each downward stroke firm and bold and each upward stroke light and airy. His breathing is steady and assured. His existence till now has been so inextricably married to his parental role that I can't look at him without seeing a father first and everything else after. But tonight he looks vulnerable. I do not see the fatherly aspects I have loved about him—the booted thump, the muscled back, the broad smiles he gave my sister and me. I see instead a slumbering, unadorned being, lying with his arm dangling from the sofa. I note his more fragile, more human particulars—the eyes squeezed shut, the worn socks peeking through a rumpled blanket, his thoughts about a lost war set on paper scattered about on the coffee table. I worry about the funny sensation that clings to his left side and wonder if it is a serious medical condition. The deeper reserve of calm he has managed to accumulate through the years seems to be dwindling. Now, late in life and in a foreign country, he suddenly needs to be rescued.

A moist, whistling sound escapes from his lungs. I crane my neck to look. He stirs slightly and crosses his arms over his chest, as if to shield his vital parts with his more expendable limbs. His face takes on a beleaguered look. His eyelids move rapidly. With mounting irritation, his breathing becomes ever more labored in the evening's prevailing hush. I reach out to touch him. Wake up, I say. My first thoughts are that he is having a heart attack, until I see that his fingers are pressed against his eyelids as if to seal them from the world, as if to shield something from view.

A bad dream, I think, relieved. But I am startled when his body snaps upward, as if it were suddenly subjected to a powerful electrical charge. What is wrong, I ask. His eyes open. He looks aggrieved. I see the flutter of eyelashes and the flush of confusion. He says nothing and shakes his head. I reach toward him but feel the rejection of his recoiling arm. Finally, he whispers a soft “I don't know.” A flush of color spreads across his face. I touch it and feel an emanating hotness against my palm.

Moments pass. Father sits still on the sofa, his forehead cradled in the palms of his hands. And then, without a word, he gets up and walks to the bathroom. I follow him. The dream is still with him, its implied threat, the whole of its weight lashed to his body. In an uninflected voice, he complains of a heaviness that haunts his body's periphery. He mutters that something is on his chest and that he cannot breathe. His body must be carrying extra weight, he insists. He steps on the scale. We both see that he has not gained a single pound. How can that be, he wonders out loud. He is convinced something has happened to make him metamorphose into a man several times his actual size.

He allows me to take his hand and walk him back to the living room. What is the dream about, I ask him. But he shakes his head and smiles ruefully. Perhaps it is irrecoverable. Or perhaps he does not want to tell me. He licks his lips as if to erase the astringent aftertaste of something unpleasant. I make him a cup of tea. After dinner, we sit side by side watching the moon glide across the darkening sky. Cloaked in blackness, I can feel his weary spirit dissolve into the agitation of the evening.

 • • • 

Little Saigon is growing and a great big world has opened up for us. We congregate in one another's houses and apartments to commemorate notable events. Weddings, births, Tet, are all openings that the Vietnamese in America use to channel the ragged immensity of their longings for things past. It is all about reconstructing and reclaiming what is gone. I accompany our father to these events, but my heart is not in them. I know he and Bao still occupy that past, its emotional nodes and swells, with doggedness and abandon.

Today I am at Uncle Somebody's apartment, two doors down from ours. He has been made the head of our community association for overseas Vietnamese. The association is our way of making a familiar mark onto this shifting world, of organizing haphazard arrangements.

It has been a few months since his wife and son joined him after an arduous boat journey from Vietnam's coast to a refugee camp in Hong Kong. They have not recovered from the tumbling chaos of their journey. The mother smiles but I can see the clenched jaws and tense facial muscles. Still, if you can catch her at the right moment, there is a fullness and a shininess to her essential being that is contagious. She is diminutive but she has made it across a vast ocean. Perhaps Mother might too. Something visceral moves through me. I see her as a prophetic spirit. I want her hard-spiritedness. Day after day she does the quiet work of maintaining the home where she is reunited with her husband.

From the day she first arrived, I have made a point of visiting her regularly. When I tell Father that she visited several Chinese in Cholon to find someone to take her and her son on a boat, Father also becomes interested. Bao too, of course. When she is in the right frame of mind, I am able to coax Aunt An into telling her story. Mother's whereabouts might be unknown but somehow a story about Cholon makes her existence somewhere in Cholon more palpable to me.

Father encourages my visits to Aunt An, perhaps so I can have real company while he sits alone on the sofa at night and obdurately stares down his war memories. He aims to organize them into chapters and subject them to analysis by the American military.

Aunt An cooks from scratch, the way we did in Vietnam. Knives and spoons make percussive sounds against cutting board and mixing bowls. She lost weight on her boat trip, prominent collarbones protruding through her shirt's neckline. She tells me she is one of these people who burn energy easily. I can see why. She moves about incessantly.

Today she and Uncle Somebody are organizing a birthday feast for their son's one-year-old daughter. A pot of water boils, frothing over onto the stove. For the discerning carnivores among us, there is a roasted suckling pig of both lean and fatty flesh, still whole and uncarved, its bronze skin crisp with a pronounced char. There is also an eye-catching riff of miniature dumplings stuffed with crushed mushrooms and crabmeat, meant to taste good and to showcase the cook's artistic presentation.

She finished cooking early and the guests have not arrived. “Tell me about how you planned your escape,” I prod. There is a brief faltering, but after a moment's pause she closes her eyes and tells me to come closer. She remembers of course.

The Chinese in Cholon had organized a network of safe houses and boat captains and navigators. She was in a yellow room in the back of a villa hidden behind tall fences. Inside her was a tug of opposing emotions, the surge of nascent possibilities and a deep grief for her husband alone on foreign soil. Those in the room were all connected in one way or another to the Chinese organizer—friends of friends, friends of relatives. She recalls the evening clearly. The desire to escape compelled her to take all risks. It was a moonless night but the sky was overflowing with stars. The room was full. There was the strong odor of eucalyptus oil that caught in the nostrils. The house was a few blocks from Ngo Quyen Street, in the heart of Cholon, she adds, noting that it was not far from our own house. I picture the house as Aunt An positions herself in front of me and continues. They needed gold, four bars for her and four bars for her son. No bags or suitcases allowed. There was no particularly auspicious time, no need to study weather patterns. The trip would begin when the boat was ready, in one week, on such and such a date, first by bus or cargo train to the coastal town of Phan Thiet and then the escape by boat at night.

A week later, when they were ushered out of the bus after a journey that took longer than they anticipated, they were not in Phan Thiet but in Ca Mau Point, a remote coastal city perched on the southernmost tip of the country. Phan Thiet had never been the planned destination to begin with and the switch to Ca Mau was done to ensure secrecy and security. But Ca Mau had its own advantages. It was part of the vast Chinese trading network. Since the early 1880s, the Chinese had been coming to this area despite its isolation, navigating their cargo junks through the interconnecting waterways linking the trading towns of Hainan, Ca Mau, and Singapore. There are lush mangrove swamps on one side and a long line of seaboard on the other. Farthest from the capital and battered by sea winds and storms, Ca Mau natives are to this day sturdy, eccentric sorts used to throwing themselves into the elements. Its coast offers deep moorage for fishing boats owned by fifth- and sixth-generation fishermen already inclined toward deep-sea travel. A fierce, poetic sense of independence defines the very spirit of the town and its inhabitants as well.

Aunt An's bus bounced on stretches of rough, uneven surface until it swerved onto a side road, stopping by a lone shanty at the edge of a dirt trail. The main road was no longer passable. The thirty people on the bus were told to disembark into the dreaded night. Three fishermen in charge of the voyage, all Ca Mau natives, were waiting for them. I know the details Aunt An will soon provide. I have heard this part before. Aunt An held her son's hand. He was almost eighteen but she still wanted to protect him. She clung to him fiercely, the way she did when he was a child. Together they made their way through the slow slog of alluvial soil, up the soft foothills with errant underbrush, and finally down a slender path toward the beach. A sea-salt fragrance floated in with the breeze. They pulled each other forward, following the darkened outlines of those trudging tentatively ahead. Everyone held on to the person in front, each terrified of being left behind. Clusters of mosquitoes circled above. She cursed the fact that they were unloaded all at the same time and feared the presence of thirty people descending all at once onto these vast sandy stretches would alert harbor police and other officials.

A hard rain began to fall. Her eyes smarted from the sea salt. The surroundings were muted by the silvery-hued darkness and the mist of rain and fog. Rain, she thought, borne by these gusts of wind, could be a blessing in disguise, offering them additional cover from detection.

To her left, a woman tearfully bade her sister good-bye. “Take her, little sister. My daughter is now yours,” the woman said. To her little girl, no more than two years old, the mother said, “Call your aunt ‘Mother' from now on, you understand? She is your mother now.” Aunt An tells me she could sense the failings of their circumstances, the narrowing of options, the act of last resort. She describes how the little girl clung to her mother and whimpered. As her mother turned to go back to the bus, the little girl ran after her, skittered, and fell. Her sandals had caught on something sharp and protruding.

The part that startles me each time Aunt An repeats the story will come next. It is always the same. Even though I know the story, I listen with the furious concentration of a child. In a tone of soft tenderness she tells me about how she knelt down to scoop up the little girl. With a disquieting sigh, the girl's mother switched her story and assured her daughter with a long string of frenetic promises. I will join you soon. I will be with you, she said. In the meantime, stay with her, the mother whispered, pointing to her sister. Your mother loves you and
she
loves you, darling. She is your family, the mother assured even as the little daughter wept. I want my mommy, I want my mommy, the girl cried, extending her arm in a desperate attempt to make contact with the mother's flesh. Her face wet with tears and rain, the mother turned and walked away. The little girl sucked air and shrieked as Aunt An put an indelicate hand over her mouth to cover the scream.