The Lotus and the Storm (36 page)

They took turns, the sister and Aunt An, carrying the little girl on their backs as they marched. They walked in silence. When the girl's aunt tired, Aunt An took over. She could feel the girl's fretful sobs against her back as she navigated the slick, narrow pathway that was at times dense with gnarls of ground cover and shimmering with the wetness of rain. When she needed to shift position, she carried the girl in the front, curled up against her bosom. As she walked she looked into the little girl's face, touching its roundness, feeling the hair as soft as feathers and black like her fear. Intuitively, she worked to make her steps predictable. The child, she hoped, would be soothed and rocked by the march.

At last, from a small, sandy promontory, they could see the coast through the near-monochromatic blackness of water and sky. She could feel the pebbles against her shoes. The rain had abated but a mist, ethereal and light, hung above. The air was tinged with salt. Their steps quickened. Her son held out his hand to help her along. She stretched her body and felt the slow elongation of muscles on her back. The child had been handed off to her aunt. In the faint blue-hued light they could barely make out the boat. But she could tell. This wooden boat was designed to haul little more than fruits on the rivers of the country. They would have to put their faith in this ineffectual little craft.

I know what happens next. I don't ask Aunt An to finish the story anymore. After five days at sea, the little girl died, her head cradled by her mother's sister and her feet stretched out in Aunt An's lap. Two days later, red itchy patches like insect bites appeared on Aunt An's body. She sat on her hands to keep herself from scratching them and aggravating the redness. Bed bugs, she said to herself. She covered herself, concealing the red ugliness with a blanket wrapped around her body. But the spots moved to her face and soon formed pustules conspicuously filled with a clear liquid. They could no longer be passed off as bug bites. And she could no longer resist, especially at night when she pulled and scratched the severely inflamed areas until the blistered walls broke. Soon people moved away from her. There was no way to say “chicken pox” diplomatically. Once announced, the information fell heavily. She could feel the blisters on the inside of her mouth and the back of her throat. Her eyes were also covered by thick-crusted lesions. Only her son and the aunt of the dead baby stayed close by, protectively shielding her from the raw intensity of others' glares. She felt herself slipping into a fever. Her entire body was emanating heat. She closed her eyes. Even in her wearied and light-headed state, she could make out the intonation of crisis; she knew what was being said through the agitation of clipped voices. She realized it was her very life that was being debated. Her son sobbed. She saw fear in his face. He held her hand. She tried to wrench it from his, worried that she could infect him. She understood what was happening. She was tainted. They were going to throw her overboard the following morning. She imagined it, her last moment, the harsh orange sun appearing, the blazing sky opening up to greet dawn's arrival, the water vast and immense, swallowing her in its grip. Frothy swells slapped the sides of their little boat. She was not angry. She no longer cared. She looked into their faces. She saw their panic and the concomitant resolve to live. The last thing she remembered before drifting off into a dream was the feeling of sadness moving beyond her.

In the morning she heard voices through the tail end of her dream. Orders were being issued in a foreign language. Her arms and legs were sunburned. The boat shook. She saw sun-darkened faces, fissured and creviced. A group of men thundered on board, pointing in this and that direction. She saw their knives and guns, smelled a sour blend of beer and sweat. She knew. Pirates. She heard more voices, tearful pleas, and fitful cries. A woman and child were thrown across the boat. A man stepped forward and slapped them back and forth with the palm and back of his hand. She saw the child's split upper lip. The man lowered himself astride the woman's chest. Men were clubbed and thrown overboard. Aunt An closed her eyes. Things were being thrown about, and then she felt everything come to a sudden stop. A big shaft of light was beamed in her direction. She closed her eyes, shielding them with cupped hands. There were decisive gasps and deep raspy voices. Their eyes roamed her face. She looked and saw exaggerated frowns and raised eyebrows at the edge of her vision. Then there was quiet and only the sound of quick-booted steps leaving. A frothy wind stirred.

It was she who had driven the pirates away. It was the very sight of her. Her limbs and body were themselves bursts of hot red. She carried the intrinsic threat of contagion.

No one spoke. A child asked meekly, “When are we going home?”

Later that very same day, as she lay curled inside herself, a ship appeared. On its side, she saw the words USS
Francis Hammond (FF 1067)
. She knew they would be rescued this time, and they were.

Her story has a happy ending but grief has nestled deep inside her. There she sits at the kitchen table, stilled by its undercurrent. Her husband, the same Uncle Somebody who had escaped much earlier, comes toward her from their bedroom and puts a sympathetic hand on her back.

The first time she told me the boat story, she had mentioned a man who had only one leg who was in the house in Cholon when their escape was planned. He was there to contemplate throwing in his lot with the Chinese. Aunt An was never introduced to him but apparently many in that house in Cholon knew him. She remembered the twitches of his severed limb, the puckered, irregularities of the flesh. She remembered the way he appended his prosthetic, fashioning adjustments, tightening and loosening the hinges toward the end of the evening. How would he have managed the long journey, practically speaking? To her bewilderment, she found herself staring at his blatant, defiant misfortune. There were many amputees in Saigon but this man was well-to-do, crisply dressed, and sitting within arm's reach of her.

I asked her his name when I first heard the story. She did not know.

She still cannot recall it when I ask her again. Did he have a scar on his jawline? She is not sure. As Aunt An says, there are many men without limbs in Saigon. How can I be sure, she asks?

Is it possible he is Uncle Number Two? If Uncle Number Two contemplated escape, surely he would have involved our mother in the plan. My heart leaps.

I am like a detective who wants the witness to retell the incident, hoping that the act of retelling will help the witness remember a new but crucial detail.

I ask if the man with one leg was alone or with someone but Aunt An does not know. I ask if anyone in the vicinity called him by name but she has no recollection.

Later in the evening, I am allowed to greet guests at the door, fetching them drinks and offering them spring roll appetizers. Uncle Somebody and Aunt An cut through the crowd and nudge our father toward the table to eat. Strangers mingle solicitously with one another, each bound to the other by an old complicity to keep the country we left behind in the center of our collective memories.

The little girl, Aunt An's grandchild, was born at nine in the morning the Year of the Goat, a fact that is scrutinized so that predictions about her life can be made. In Saigon of course grandparents from the mother's and father's sides would be present, as would hundreds of relatives. Here the baby is surrounded by friends culled from her parents' connections to this or that shop in Little Saigon. She is dressed in a bright red
ao dai.
Her father and mother take turns holding her on their laps as cameras
click. She is clearly unaware of the little storm of emotion surrounding her rite of passage. She sits on a patch of blanket, mouthing unintelligible words, reaching for objects, deliberately placed curiosities that include a mirror, a pen, a dollar bill. Will she be drawn to beauty, education, or finance? Before she is able to confront the unlived future and make her selection, her grandfather shoves all three objects, the entire scattering of surprises, before her, exclaiming that his granddaughter will have it all.

The ceremony is over and children now run up and down the apartment's narrow hallway. Wine is served. Someone has opened the screen door leading to a small balcony. A man leans against the iron railing and lights up a cigarette. Perhaps he can sense that I am staring at him although his back is toward me. He turns around and gives me a cordial smile. I am frozen. I am fixed on the plain creaturely fact of his gesture. A moment ago, he had aimed a match across the matchbox's rough surface and struck it. He had taken a long, pensive drag on his cigarette and slowly exhaled.

I run into the kitchen. Aunt An is at the sink, scrubbing a star fruit under a gush of water. She looks at me, mild-eyed, but she can tell from my expression that I am full of excitement. Yes, she says, making an experimental question mark with her voice.

I grab her sleeve as if to press her into urgency. I ask her over and over if the man with no legs smoked. She recalls the odor of cigarette at that house, yes. And next to her, where he sat, yes, she does recall someone smoking with deep, steady intakes. She remembers the glitter his hand produced. The cigarette was held in a gold holder. His fingers were stained with nicotine.

I can feel my heart skip. I press a palm against my chest as if to calm its quick, tremulous beat. I can feel it. Surely Mother is plotting to leave. Surely any of her Chinese friends, Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller or Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist, will be of help. She is at their house now, putting together her final plan
.

BAO, 2006

W
e are on the outer edge of winter, impatiently waiting for spring to arrive. Melted snow has disappeared and the first hardy heads of daffodils are poking through the earth's shadows with raw abandon. I watch as Mai steers the car in turgid silence, slowly, cautiously, through an utterly familiar road that stretches from the house to the nursing home.

Yes, our father has just moved to a nursing home. Both he and Mai, he especially, put forth a common front regarding this fact: that it is temporary and hence utterly reversible. They see it as purely a matter of his health. He is not being abandoned. His belongings are still at home. The bed is as he left it the day he moved, blue cotton sheets, blue comforter neatly folded, lying at its foot. Every few days Mai peeks in. Sometimes she takes a paper towel and dusts his night tables. Being inside a space that has been his for years inspires an abiding sense of tenderness in her. When she closes the door she says a quiet “I love you,” something she has yet to tell him in person.

In Vietnam there would be no question that he would remain at home where, frail or not, he would continue to exercise his commendable prerogative as father. There is a stubborn faith that illness itself would not transform the fundamentals. More personal and financial resources would be turned over to the necessity of his care. Family would stay together—four walls, one roof, and many generations. Think of Aunt An, her husband, their son, and the son's wife and baby, all together, struggling through the shared ruins of addiction and debt.

When Father was first admitted into the nursing home, it was meant to be temporary. He left with one bag, as if he were going on an overnight trip—a set of pajamas, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hand towel, a pair of slippers, two undergarments, and a comb. Aunt An's history at the nursing home facilitated his admission. Her presence also made his departure from home less abrupt.

I remember watching with a premonition of loss. His life was being pared down to the simplest elements. He feared he was becoming a responsibility. That was how he slipped away. He had become progressively weak, but after the fall in the bathroom, his decline was precipitous. The spectacle of his frailty concerned him—the cane, the tentative steps, the increasing effort it took to do his daily chores.

Mai fought the urge to flee the truth of our father's diminishing existence. One moment she was sitting with a notebook and pen in her law firm office and the next moment she was driving home to pack him up. He had called the police and reported seeing a corpse on the floor of the apartment. The need to have him monitored was no longer something to be postponed. To keep Mai from feeling the prick of her own and others' criticism, he characterized his move as temporary. It was an inaccurate rendering of the truth. Indeed, Mrs. An, efficient as always, brought a small suitcase from our apartment to the nursing home and filled out the post office change of address form for him. A morning passed, an evening, and then another. Light and dark sifted through his room at home. Just like that, he was gone, leaving behind a big space in a bedroom that remained incongruously full of his belongings. The towel he used to wash his face that morning still hangs on the bathroom rack. Mai never truly faced this manifest but unmentionable fact, that her father would remain at an institution for the rest of his life.

Indeed, at some point it was no longer her choice to make. He became sicker and weaker. His heartbeat became irregular. His lips sometimes turned purple, the color of dusk in Saigon. One lung, then another, collapsed and every breath he took had to be negotiated with increased agitation. His breathing became labored and erratic. He made moist, breathy sounds. There were good days but often there were terrible relapses.

When the doctor announced that he should stay at the nursing home, he gave the idea an approving and endorsing nod. Ever since then, Mai has become bound up with a sense of precautionary solicitude where our father is concerned. She is forever grateful that the nursing home he is in is the same one Aunt An has been working at for almost twenty years.

Still, she calls it the assisted-living facility presumably to miniaturize his daily needs and make them seem more manageable.

The window on the driver's side is partly open and offers a light, cool breeze. Everything is bathed in a sun-warmed light tinted with a crisp freshness promised by the imminence of spring. A daylight crackle of new possibility hangs in the air. Yet she is driving as if she were headed for something less welcoming.

Today is the day Uncle Number Two visits Father at the nursing home. It is a new and absolutely astonishing development. It will be the first time we see Uncle Number Two in more than twenty-five years. He is flying from California, where he has been living since arriving in the United States by boat many years ago—when Mai was still in high school. Every few years he threatens to fly out to Virginia for a visit on the single stubborn conviction that his friendship with Father is too important to abandon. The first and only visit to Father within the first year of Uncle Number Two's arrival was a colossal failure. There was no vindication. There were no embraces.

He first wrote Father a long letter when he made it to Malaysia and for some reason Father holds him responsible for what happened to Mother and Uncle Number Five after 1975. This is the insurmountable fact: He of all people is here and Mother is not. Why not?

Still, Uncle Number Two will arrive at Father's bedside with, I imagine, the furious attention of a man trying to sidestep his friend's deep reproach so he can salvage their common past. He is willing to suffer whatever humiliations necessary to resurrect their once-sanctified friendship. Mai believes she needs to play the part of buffer. I am privy to her thoughts but she is not privy to mine. Imagine it this way. She is the exterior. I am the core. I am buried inside her and can see her from the inside out. She believes she can make sense of the befuddling accusations that she knows Father will heap upon Uncle Number Two.

But I suspect otherwise. Father will lie in his bed with his arms rigid at his sides. Even in this position, he will strike a pugilistic stance. Uncle Number Two will bemoan the fact that his show of remorse, his desire to make amends, and his admission of fault, all thirty years' worth of it, have failed to reunite the two. And Father will say that he does not believe any of Uncle Number Two's contrition. And their conversation will, in the end, resolve nothing, accomplish nothing, mean nothing, despite the pain involved. Yet every year it seems they are destined to repeat it.

How have they gotten so lost, Mai asks in her small voice.

I can guess at the answer. Perhaps the cracks in their friendship lie in a much larger perversity that transcends the intricate calibrations of who did what to whom. The cut is too deep and Father is too wounded to release the hurt. He hasn't “let it go,” as Mai puts it, despite Uncle Number Two's pleas of so many years ago. He will not let it go now, least of all now. Letting go is something Mai has done but it is not something we do.

Unlike me, Mai doesn't have violent flashes that make her squint and blink and scream and gasp for air as if she could barely breathe. There is no terrible seizing up, no obstreperous thump that echoes through the gathering darkness of night. There are no moods or outbursts to send her staggering. There is, instead, just an aqueous, meager stillness that she perfects as she slowly progresses into Americanness, navigating through the routine of our new lives, slightly detached from the present, slightly unavailable. Nothing in the here and now truly gathers significance or makes a dent. It doesn't matter because ultimately she can shrug it all off. I know, with a sense of droning certitude, that I am the one among the three of us who has been holding our blemishes inside me. She is where she is, fine and assimilated, because I have made it possible.

Our father is in bed, physically there, though seemingly disembodied. The shape and form of him, of his body's physicality, can be discerned under the white sheets. I am equivocally moved. I reach out to him as if he were already slipping away. I want to sit by his bedside and listen to him spill his stories from long ago into the here and now. I like being the keepsake of his memories.

I call him Ba, which means “Father.” He leans forward and holds my hand. He is still unsure. Am I Mai or Bao.

“Is it you?” he asks. I nod. Mai nods.

He is discernibly tired. “Ba, let me sit you up,” I say as I prop a pillow behind his back. I touch his face to see if he needs a shave. His hair glides smoothly between my fingers. It doesn't need to be brushed but I brush it anyway.

“Bao Bao,” he says as he relinquishes himself to me. I smile. He knows I am the one who tends to his daily needs.

He squeezes my hand. I am touched. Our individual consciousness converges.
Ba
is a beautiful word. A word that gives and receives.
Ba
is that simple, elemental word, one of the first words babies know how to make. I love it. One vowel, one consonant, working together to make a sound that requires no coaxing because it effortlessly slips from the mouth.

I was here by his side when he received a phone call from Uncle Number Two last week. Uncle Number Two did not ask to visit but merely announced he would be coming. Our father rolled his eyes as he listened.

“I want us to see each other's face when we talk this time,” Uncle Number Two said, his voice beaming through the speakerphone.

When the short phone conversation ended, our father turned toward me with a look that was neither sullen nor petulant. Was this visit meant to be a resumption of their friendship? Or the culmination of it?

Mai hesitates at the bed's footboard. She pauses, almost with acute formality, as if she were standing on tiptoe at the edge of the ocean, as if that moment of hesitation will somehow better prepare her for the water's chill before the full-body plunge into the blue depths. She fears the shock of cold and water. She dislikes the manifestation of anxieties, the aura of gravity and remonstrance already in the room.

She stands nearby, looking around. Her eyes scan the room, checking the surface of things for dust. She touches his shoulder. She can feel his delicate anatomy.

She can hear his wet, raspy breaths. His face is proffered toward her. It is the mild, eager face of a father marked by a hollow space that fear has carved. Hard to imagine before her is a man who has killed. Perhaps as a Buddhist, he regrets that he has and knows the karmic consequences of this fact. And here he is now, waiting to be fed. Lunch, yes, she will feed him lunch. We both will. She will not eat because she cherishes the feeling of emptiness in her stomach. It makes her feel clean and light, unburdened by the deadweight of food.

“How are you doing?” she asks. She puts her lips against his forehead. Her phone is in her hand. She glances at it discreetly. He can see that she is edgily checking her e-mail.

Our father motions her closer. “Tell me how your work is going,” he asks. I know he wants to engage her but the simple American present is elusive for him—and me. His voice becomes overanimated.

Mai nods uncertainly.

“Tell me about a case you're on,” he suggests.

I know work is not an ardent interest but it does keep her occupied. And so she proceeds to tell him the details of her case. “It's not the sort of case our firm usually handles,” she says. She tells him that the client is an executive from a big respectable company charged by the federal government with murder and extortion. “Murder is hardly ever tried in a federal court,” she informs.

“It must be interesting, then, that it is,” our father declares, but his voice lacks conviction.

“It's only in federal court because of a federal statute and that federal statute contains a list of predicate acts that constitute violations of the statute. Those predicate acts include things like murder, which is usually a state crime.”

“You're doing fine at work, then,” our father states.

Mai nods. I watch as she holds his hand.

He looks at his watch. He must be in a sea swell of nostalgia, I think, as he waits for the arrival of his old friend.

“I don't need him to come,” he mutters. He looks at the door expectantly.

“Can you not talk about what happened or did not happen with him? Let it alone,” Mai suggests. She is solution-oriented. She wants to help him by making pragmatic suggestions.

“Huh,” he says, as if to expel something unwanted from his lungs. He is probably weighing a series of contradictory impulses. “Then what else will we have to talk about! We have nothing else that would even link us together.” He nods to himself, as if to agree with his own observation. He looks at Mai, me, us. A smile lights up his face. He can afford to stare at us with the offhandedness of someone possessing unquestioned paternal authority.

“Okay, but whatever he brings up, I'm just saying don't let it bother you. Whatever happened between the two of you, it's already done. Finished. There's nothing you can do to change it. So just let it be,” she advises.

I roll a side table to his bedside and put a bowl of pho noodle soup on it. The rich, heady broth is exactly as he likes it—cooked on a low fire overnight with bones still covered with fat and gristle and tender bits of brisket and flank. Charred whole onions and ginger had been added to produce an extra-brown coloring. Wisps of heat rise from a special oolong tea.

I give him one spoonful, then another, but he eats only meekly. He has no appetite. The bedside table is crammed with appurtenances of old age—bottles of pills, an oxygen tank, and cans of liquid food containing fortified vitamins and minerals. His face is defined by lines and angles and a protrusion of bones. Mai watches him eat and flashes him an indulgent smile. She sighs. She feels a sharp tear inside her, like the sound of a nut being cracked. Blue stripes dance up and down the white cloth of his cotton pajamas. He pulls the cord to ask for Aunt An, who quickly appears, draws the curtain around his bed, and proceeds to change him.