The Lotus and the Storm (44 page)

“I loved your mother,” he declares earnestly.

“Did she love you?” I ask.

“To be honest,” he answers obligingly, “if she did, it's because I loved her.” He jabs his finger at his own chest. “Your father and I had gone on a dangerous operation together in Cambodia, and when he was under fire, I did what I could to ensure he was safe.” He smiles self-consciously. “I downplayed it. I told your parents it was just a matter of military duty. But the truth is, I did it for her. By pure instinct. I didn't want her to suffer another death of a loved one. I think she knew it.”

“I know the story. My father told me that you risked your life,” I interrupt.

“Whatever it was, your mother was very touched by it. We'd both sacrificed something of ourselves for someone else. On that level, she understood me. And turned to me. And who could have ever predicted that she would get pregnant at her age and we would have a child together.” He turns away from me, looking into space. He fidgets. I see his back quiver and only then am I aware that he is crying. “Your mother loved you very much. Never doubt it.”

I still can only guess at what might have happened years ago to our mother. Still, with this news, I can cling to the gentle swell of a new order: Our mother did not behave capriciously, or hard-heartedly. She was flawed but not heartless. We were not callously abandoned. Cliff tells me that although the whereabouts of my sister are not known, he believes she is still somewhere in Saigon. A part of us is out there, somewhere, waiting for a reunion.

“I hadn't planned to tell you any of this,” he says. “But you wanted to know and I think it will do you good.” He pauses, then asks, “What will you do now?”

“I will take him home,” I say. My answer surprises me. I hadn't known it until now, but once voiced, it seems like the most natural thing in the world—to take him home. To the place where a part of our mother still is.

“Home,” Cliff says with visible emotion as he smooths a stray hair from my face.

We remain together on the sofa through the evening's pallor, displaced and disassembled. I cannot help but look at him with a mingled sense of pleasure and surprise. The same thought must run through him too. “So this is who you've become,” he says several times. He turns teary when I tell him what Uncle Number Two told us about our mother. We pass the time bringing each other indulgently up to date about the events of our lives. His sons have married and have children of their own. His wife died years ago.

We eat, drink, and surf the television channels. Through long moments of enveloping silence, I am filled with memories of our time together in Cholon. And I am certain the same memories inhabit him.

MAI, 2006

I
am back in the country where I was born.

If one measures the depth of love by the persistence of sorrow following love's separation or loss, then I can say I truly love this place. And for the Vietnamese, indeed that is how love is weighed and judged, by a lifetime of grief. Loving is bound up with suffering. I grew up with stories about pain, love, and fidelity. A woman waits for her warrior husband to come home. She carries her child to the top of a mountain so she can witness his return from the summit's peak. Through heat and rain, she waits, until she becomes a rock, eternally frozen in time. In matters of the heart, we persevere and endure, even in the face of hopelessness.

For years, when it was morning in Virginia, my mind drifted steadfastly twelve hours forward to evening in Cholon, where every unpretentious detail of life over there can be rehearsed with habitual affection, reimagined with quotidian particularity. It is as if I remain aligned somehow with a different time zone, subjunctive and contingent. Cholon became phantomlike, a childhood city lovingly buffed in my imagination to a perpetually lustrous glow. In this habit, I found both pain and its antidote—solace.

And now I am here as if by magical transport. Though it feels instantaneous and magical only because I took a sleeping pill on the plane. When I arrived in the evening, Tan Son Nhat Airport seemed unreal, with its runways spilling theatrically over the land and its rows of lights shining a path that glowed as if illuminated from within. As the plane made its descent, tracing a downward arc across an ebony-dark landscape lit by the hypnotic allure of starry pinpricks, I was barely awake. From above, the city was but a blur of color that lovingly came into focus only as the plane began tipping its wings. When the plane landed, I felt as if Saigon had been willed into unlikely existence by an extravagant act of faith—mine.

The next morning I get ready to venture into the streets. I find myself reflexively studying the faces of people around me, even though I fully realize the improbabilities associated with the exercise. It might be nothing more than poetic conceit, but I tell myself I will recognize her soul the moment I am in her vicinity. And so I go on staring at features, searching for signs of the Eurasian mix. One of these young women might be our mother's lost child.

The city itself has been resurrected and revived, after its long decline. People are now allowed to buy and sell. Cars and motorbikes rev their engines and honk their horns as they swerve through the vertiginous Saigon traffic. Tourists sip coffee at outdoor cafés and luxuriate in the delicately mannered, colonial atmosphere of Old World hotels.

Despite the familiar undertow, everything has been altered by the vagaries of fate and the curse of defeat. It is still Saigon. But my infatuation with it is mingled with suspicion. There is the old Rex Hotel and the Brodard Café where we used to have ice cream served in pineapple and coconut shells. There is the French Opera House. For all their anticolonial rhetoric, the Communist regime has preserved everything French. I look around, wanting to be overtaken by nostalgia.

I wonder what can be won back from the jolts and bends of loss. The black, stolid statue dedicated to the South Vietnamese soldier and sanctified has been torn down. A new flag, not yellow with three red stripes but red with a five-pointed star eerily reminiscent of China's flag, now flies above the old French Opera House and every other public building. I am on Tu Do Street. I cannot bear to call it by its new name, Dong Khoi. This is where our parents used to take my sister and me for early evening strolls through the boulevards of venerable villas and old tamarind trees. But the place has turned falsely familiar.

It is exactly as it was
—this is what people like me want very much to tell themselves when they return home. But this is not the case. Thirty years after the war's end, the city is visited daily by the love-struck Viet Kieu, the overseas Vietnamese who, like me, are perpetually filled with unrequited longing. We have embarked on our trips in search of a time and place that no longer exists. We have carried our lives here from the other side of the earth. We want to take a lungful of air and fall in love. And we are clearly not ready to adjust our expectations to meet this radically different reality.

If it were not for the hard currency—U.S. dollars—we bring with us, we wouldn't even be welcome here. This is no longer my city. It is no longer my inheritance.

I keep a strict accounting of my activities. I take care to avoid raw vegetables for fear of getting sick. I drink only bottled water and even then I check to make sure the thermoplastic sheet hasn't been broken and surreptitiously resealed. I prefer water with fizz—the hiss and crackle produced when the bottle is opened will guarantee that it hasn't been tampered with. I ignore the call of street vendors hawking steamed crepes served in bamboo bowls.
“Baaaannnhhhh cuuuoooon,”
an elderly woman beckons in a long-drawn-out drawl as she drifts by. I shy away, cast my eyes downward, stumbling past her, and I feel a quick tumult of disapproval moving inside me.

I know it is Bao, disappointed that I have returned home only to behave the way an ordinary stranger to the city would. Over the years of shadow dances, I have managed to get a sense of her mood. Right now she is feeling almost primal excitement. Home at last, she makes peace with Vietnam as it is.

I am surprised that since my return to Saigon, Bao's slippage into my reality has been more frequent. I have, more than ever, felt her thumping presence and the push of her ravenous will. It is as if the secret tangle of her existence has escaped from the subterranean darkness, shooting life outward. She is at home and so she exerts herself fully here. A part of me feels what she feels—a humming exhilaration that vibrates as if the atoms were aligned and alive.

Just a few hours ago I found myself in a network of unpaved alleys rutted with dry, brackish mud. I was emerging, with unfolding exactness but a fraction off center, from a blackout—many minutes, perhaps hours, of lost time—in which Bao customarily takes over and I lose consciousness. Bao must have taken charge and made a foray into a neighborhood I would never have ventured into on my own. Around us were modest structures of unfinished plywood and corrugated tin that randomly doubled as houses and makeshift restaurants. Men and women with children were sitting on short wooden stools, hunched over long tables covered by smudged plastic tablecloths. The air was permeated with the pungent scent of charred meat, fried scallions, dripping fat, and chopped lemongrass. A man lit his cigarette. The sudden flare of his match emitted a phosphorescent glow. A stray dog sniffed through the garbage and howled. I suddenly felt feeble, caught inside the agitation and chaos merging and converging within me. Bao looked at me with the pure bafflement and practiced disdain of her assessing eyes.

I knew, of course, that she did not like me.

A melodic voice floated from an open window nearby. A woman was singing a simple lullaby. It was a swelling, blossoming moment for Bao. Her feelings coursed through me, expanding into something arching and enormous. Here, in Saigon, inside this transport of Bao's intense emotions, it still might be possible for me to absorb Bao's fervency. I might even feel her ardor and claim the fullness of the moment as mine.

I am suddenly seized by a thought: To truly discover myself here, I must hang on to Bao. I keep going despite the fear of relapse. Both of us are claiming the moment. It is a big task, managing and modulating one's expectations. For the first time in more than thirty years I am riding on her optimism. I am filled with a large, booming sense of anticipation.

So I hail a taxi. I hold on to myself and put myself in full alert mode. The air smells of heat. Smoke rises from the parched tar on the road. Around us, motorcycles surge and shudder, shifting gears. I am in teeming, battered Cholon. There is Ngo Quyen Street. The taxi edges through a dismembered line of traffic and makes a slow-paced turn onto my street. The sight of it through the car window fills me with a soothing warmth. I crane my neck, trying to feel the old moorings. There is much unburdening and resolving left to do, even in a place that is barely recognizable. The possibility for salvage remains, even when the slippage is great and the framing skewed. The entire body remembers.

I feel her jazzed-up emotions plainly, without letting them displace my own perceptions and expectations. I get out and walk about, eavesdropping on this new far-flung life that is shimmering into place. I know this diesel-scented air and the hawkers and peddlers who do commerce in the pulsing energy and bustling chaos of Chinatown. I know the crisscrossing roads where our mother used to drive around in her Peugeot. I know the confined spaces between tight alleyways, the five-spice powder and other odors emanating from sidewalk stalls. I am walking past the corner where James's encampment once stood. Now it houses a narrow three-story villa with a disconsolate sign dressed up in gilt letters advertising lodging. This is the street my sister and I roamed. A thousand new possibilities could have occurred here. Instead the future was foreclosed in one quicksand moment.

I realize that I am but a few steps away from a house that is no longer there. I cannot even locate the spot where it once stood. French-era hotels and the Opera House are preserved but everything else has been demolished to make way for the new. Still, I step up to that imaginary spot where the future once held little threat. I look at the surrounding space with proprietary wonder and ascendant hope, searching for the afterimage of life as I once knew it. I imagine a little black mynah bird flying about, swiping its wings, black eyes peering, yellow beak searching and poking. My head swivels, as if to catch sight of shiny black feathers dancing nearby.

My sister might be standing nearby with her notebook, an angel without a shadow. The mango tree might have been here, frail and muted, or over there, its leaves moist and green. The star fruit tree could have been somewhere next to it. I am both restless and anchored, touched and alienated, present and invisible.

Droplets of water fall from the treetops. The clouds are swollen and flannel gray, beautiful and awful. The sky darkens and glistens, signaling the imminence of short but heavy downpours. I realize we are at the peak of the monsoon season. Under the threat of rain, footsteps quicken. Engines spurt and rev. A car nearby bolts and squeals inside a puff of tire smoke. Headlights glow pale and jaundiced in the accumulating haze. Plastic sheets are draped over heads and shoulders.

Quickly, I seek shelter under the nearest eaves, still trying to determine the approximate location of our house. All the landmarks that I would normally use to calculate its whereabouts are themselves gone. I stand there, staring, waiting to see if our old life can somehow return to its original shape.

Before I know it, the sky opens and it pours, just as it did when my sister and I played on this street. With the rain, new life, plucky and eager, is unsprung. Little children peel off their clothes and run open-mouthed onto the sidewalks into the drumming downpour. Sheets of silken water pour from gutters and eaves and produce a deafening sound that vivifies and overwhelms. I remember how it was on that fateful day. Children shrieked. Rain poured, overwhelming the roof spout. A few hours later, there was the long-drawn-out instance of momentary indecision as our parents' car slowed down beside us.

I hear a voice, not mine, but another, inside mine, calling out for forgiveness. In my mind I see James, our Chinese grandmother, and my sister as we walk back from our illegitimate outing in the alleyways of Cholon. Now death has followed two of them. Is our Chinese grandmother still alive, eking out a living somewhere in Cholon? The rain continues its downpour, drowning out most sounds. But through it all I hear a barely discernible voice again, floating in the hot quavering whiteness of a summer downpour. It is not just enunciating a name, but rather, calling out to me. It is intimately known to me, like an alternate, parallel voice that bears my soul but has split from me to forge a different path. There it is, to my left, to my right, transparent and lucid, like starlight. I try to hold the moment, to be part of it, to snake my arms around it. I feel it vibrate briefly until it moves on.

I feel Bao's shudders as she steps out, straight into the cascade of water, hoping to catch the voice in her hands, but the moment she moves, it vanishes. I stand still, watching, immobile, oblivious to the water that washes over me. I am drenched but I seek no shelter. Instead, like Bao, I too lean into the rain and allow myself the opportunity to catch up with the buildup of emotions. Bao's shoulders heave—a sight that springs a rush of tenderness in me.

Our lives of separateness seem to be disintegrating here. For a few moments I am inside her gravitational field. We are together in a double loop of shared consciousness, hermetically sealed from the world. I can feel, down at the molecular level, what she feels, a deep condensed grief that seems unbounded.

 • • • 

I am eating pho at Pho 24, a few blocks from the hotel, enjoying the rich broth, delicately balanced with the right mix of beef bone, charred onion, roasted ginger, star anise, black cardamom, coriander, fennel, and clove. The restaurant, part of a franchise, is authentic but also clean and somewhat Westernized. The idea is to bring pho from the world of cheap street food to a more upscale and modern setting.

The local magazine I am reading reports that the “24” refers to the twenty-four ingredients that make up the secret formula. The lawyer in me finds the story behind Pho 24 interesting. I have studied franchise agreements. I am intrigued that there are plans to expand the Pho 24 brand to international markets, beyond those already in the Asia-Pacific region. California, New York City, perhaps? The transfer of intellectual property, the trademark, from East to West?

I read on, flipping the pages absentmindedly as I wait for the food to arrive. A story on the next page about an orphanage catches my attention. The headline states, in bold letters, A
MERICAN
V
ETERAN
V
O
LUNTEERS
T
IME
. There he is, the much-beloved American, in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt, standing in front of a decrepit building, seemingly transfixed by the crowd of children aligned in a tight circle surrounding him. Despite the graininess of the black-and-white photo, there is something familiar about the American suspended in freeze-frame. According to the article, a group of nuns founded the orphanage and a school that is dedicated to teaching the
bui doi,
“dust of life children,” who roam the streets and scavenge garbage dumps. The children learn English and crafts, quilt making and carpentry. Their creations are sold in select shops in the city.