The Lotus and the Storm (7 page)

“So you want to know what happened?”

I eagerly nodded. “When I had my ear against the door, I heard Uncle Number Five tell Father in a very serious voice, ‘I am warning you to be very careful, Anh Minh.'” My sister lowered her voice further. “I find that so strange, don't you?” she murmured. “Uncle said something else but I couldn't hear it. ‘There's going to be a big . . .' or something like that.”

We are always worried when our father goes on his missions and we always want him to be careful. It turned out that Uncle Number Five shared our feelings. I also knew that our father and Uncle Number Five were on opposite sides of the war. I edged closer to my sister's side.

“It's so . . . ominous,” my sister whispered.

“Maybe Uncle is just concerned. He's our family.”

“But why would Father be so upset that I overheard a family conversation, if that's all it is? He put me in a corner and made me kneel for an hour, facing the wall, as punishment.” We were amid a sprawl of pillows and blankets but suddenly I felt vulnerable. My sister's anxiety became mine. Sensing my concern, Khanh affectionately rubbed my head. “Sh, sh, it's okay,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

Before falling asleep, we hooked and locked our index fingers into a double chain that was meant to signify inevitability and finality. My sister whispered that she would always protect me. We declared that we would always be each other's topmost rung on the tallest ladder. My sister reached over to run her fingers ever so lightly on my bare arms and face and then under my shirt, caressing, lingering on my belly and chest. Night after night, I fell asleep this way, with the delicate tickle of my sister's touch on my puckered skin. Through the flare and flicker of our common lives, through the disappointments and deceits our father warned us about, I knew we would always belong to each other.

MR. MINH, 2006, 1945

I
t is always the tremors of home that are most deeply felt. Here in Virginia, I often find myself lying awake at night, watching the illuminated clock flip its numbers, seconds, minutes, hours. I lie in wait for the light of dawn, watching the present curve into a distant past. I lay my thoughts out in a straight line of reassuring sentences. “She loved me.” “I did the best I could.” My inner voice floats up to me like a filigree, soft and faint.

Once when I walked beside her on the edges of the green rice fields, my wife asked, “Who would you most like to be if you could be anyone you want in history?”

I had several apt answers but none that would qualify as one I wanted
most
to be. And so I asked her to reveal her choice instead.

“Chopin,” she said without hesitation.

In the distance that now separates us, I can only wonder. Fate stares me straight in the eye as I lie here in bed, waiting to be with my wife again, somehow. I inhale deeply. I feel the full sensation of each breath as it enters and leaves my nostrils.

The sun glares, although a chill remains in the air. I can feel it in my bones. I touch the scar on my abdomen. My wife once loved it, the puckered tissue like a mother-of-pearl fixed in lacquer. She used to run her lips over the slight indentation of scooped-out flesh that stored a reservoir of war's pain.

I know the doctor's warning. My heart is weak. My hands and feet are swollen. There is fluid buildup in my lungs. I am supposed to be more active. Walk up and down the hall of the apartment building. I am torn between ignoring her advice and heeding it.

Mrs. An walks in. She has a key to our place and has full access to it. She is ever vigilant. She can sense distress and discomfort and does what she can to rectify things quickly. I think she is temperamentally suited to care for the elderly at the nursing home where she works. Although she is normally sturdy and vigorous, today her body is slumped under the weight of sweater and coat. She gives me a few pills, then closes the bottle and puts it away.

I hear breathing and movement on the oversized armchair across from my bed. Mrs. An takes my hand and in a voice of quiet authority says, “Mr. Minh, no one is there.”

I nod and pretend to agree.

When Mrs. An leaves, I prop myself up and look. I can almost see a chest's rise and fall on the overstuffed chair. Black hair spills in a shiny monochrome onto the cushion. I know her back, its slender length, the deep groove of her spine. There is a hollowness by the smooth slopes of her shoulders. It always made an impression when she wore the
ao dai,
its sleek folds of fabric delicately sewn together to fit her slender figure. The
ao dai
is all about allusion and suggestion. The flare of its fabric, the provocative slit. That is why its movement in the wind is so beguiling.

I close my eyes. I see her as I first saw her, in soft lavender silk, in purple gloss. That day of our meeting, I glimpsed a sliver of bare midriff. The
ao dai
's body-hugging top splits sensually, slightly above waist level. From the waist down, it flows daringly, the way rivers flow, with desire and intensity, into two streams that float over wide satin trousers. It reveals and conceals, like a confession.

Even after years of marriage and separation, my heart quickens. I am still undone by the sight of her. The first time we met, she spoke without once turning toward me. Why was I even in the same room with her? I, an impecunious wanderer passing through the land of the Mekong? Someone must have introduced us. We were seated at the same table. There was the porcelain face, almost masklike, unconquerable and untouched by the ravages of sun and weather. She glanced in my direction only in quick flashes, a detachment that I first took as arrogance and later as something more. I tucked the moment away, to be retrieved when I was alone.

As she dabbed her lips with a napkin, her manners revealed centuries of exquisitely honed breeding. Her
ao dai
had an open boatneck that dared to show cleavage. Around us, French was aggressively spoken, sometimes translated for my sake, sometimes not. At one point, she rolled her eyes at the excessive use of a foreign language by those wishing to signal their upper-class starchiness. She flashed an aristocratic sneer, turned away, and at that moment noticed my own similar reaction. Our eyes locked and we smiled at each other. She did not say a word to me and turned to speak to someone else. In French, presumably to keep me from understanding, she asked someone my name. A toast to celebrate some occasion was called. Her lips parted as she raised the glass to her mouth. Only when she was getting ready to leave did I make a point of saying a few words to her, first in Vietnamese, then in French.

I smiled. I bade her farewell. “Miss Qu
ý
,” I said. “Je vais sans doute vous revoir.”
Quý
pronounced with a rising tone means “precious.” I had boldly declared I would see her again. My hand lightly touched her wrist. For a few seconds, she did not answer. Nor did she withdraw her hand. Her eyes gleamed. She turned her head, looked up at me, her chin jutting out in an apparent show of disapproval and defiance. Because she was sitting and I was standing, her neck arched scandalously. “One might have thought you would have spoken up
sooner,
” she finally said, almost mockingly.
Sooner.
She stretched it out to produce a sense of stickiness or elongation in a word that ironically suggests the opposite—a shortening of time. She too was leaving. I kept my eyes fixed on her even as she turned her back and walked toward the door. I noted her excellent carriage. As she craned her neck toward me, raising her eyebrows to signal she knew I had been watching her, I gestured a farewell.

I had been wholly unprepared for anything as extreme as that first meeting.

When the day comes, and it will, when everything, even memory, of people, of earth and water, of history, has gone from me, this is what will remain—the dreaming colors of purple evenings, a lavender
ao dai
that flows this way and that, and a rice field that illumines earth and sky in a shimmer of liquid emerald.

Mrs. An has prepared me for an outing, made me presentable to the outside world. I am dressed in a collared shirt, a thick cardigan, and neatly pressed khaki pants. I give the belt a tug and notice that its buckle gleams. Footsteps come toward me. “Ba,” a voice calls. I nod. I like the sound of the word. Father.

I lift my head and see her eyes fixed upon me. I look at the knot of tightly wound hair on my daughter's head. Mai is made up. Brown eyeliner, a dab of rouge, and glossy pink lipstick. She sports a buttoned white shirt and black trousers. She flashes me a big smile. “Are you okay, Ba?” I nod. She slips one arm under my shoulders and helps me to my wheelchair. The act of bending down momentarily shifts her scarf, revealing a brilliant bruise on the side of her neck. I have not seen bruises on her for some time and their reappearance startles me. I know the hurt she carries but I work to keep what is so unsayable about it deep inside my own self.

“Little Bao,” I say, a nickname I first used when she was a child. It means
little treasure
or
keepsake
when pronounced with a gentle dipping-rising tone. “Ba'o,” treasure, like her mother, “Quý,” which means
precious
when spoken with an upward lilt. “My Bao Bao?” I repeat. Fear and tenderness fill my heart.

With a flicking motion, she waves the sound of this name away. For a moment she looks achingly little but that moment quickly dissipates. “No,” she answers with polite firmness, or rather, exaggerated patience. With a shake of the head, she pivots into the present and in the process reverts to adulthood. Our eyes meet, unblinking. Her body stiffens and she diverts my attention with a series of coughs and a question. “Are you looking forward to our outing?” she asks in her usual obliging way. Her voice takes on a tone of utter normality.

“Yes, very much. It's a nice day to be out.” I look at her with tender devotion. I know the gamut of her emotions—reserved and reticent, dutiful and steady, but also occasionally stormy.

As she wheels me through the kitchen and toward the front door, Mrs. An looks up from the kitchen table and calls out to her, “Don't forget to send money home for me.”

“Aunt An, I will take care of it for you,” Mai promises. “I've got the envelope you gave me.” Mai fixes her scarf, flipping it nonchalantly around her neck in a manner meant to simulate carefree ordinariness.

Mrs. An nods. She walks briskly to my side and kneels down so her face is at the same level as mine. “How nice you look all put together, Mr. Minh. Have a good time out.” Pointing to Mai, Mrs. An says, “She's going to help me with an errand while she's out. She's so skilled at these things.” And she is.

Here in this external universe my daughter is clear-eyed and straight-backed. “Hullo,” she answers when a young Korean man hauling a thirty-pound bag of jasmine long grain rice greets us in the ground-floor lobby. A young Indian boy fingers his collar and lapel, revs his motorcycle engine, and winks at his girlfriend to hop onto the backseat. “Hi, Dinesh,” Mai says breezily. Dinesh nods at Mai and gives me a deep bow the Vietnamese way—arms folded across chest, head down. I recognize Dinesh. Slicked-back hair. Copper-colored tone. He lives with his father and grandmother across from us. He and Mrs. An's son are best friends. Both are charmers.

Mai manages the car smoothly, neither too slow nor too fast, piloting it along Sleepy Hollow Road and Leesburg Pike. When she makes a turn onto Wilson Boulevard, I see the dramatic Lion's Arch gate with sloping red roofs that marks the beginning of Little Saigon's Eden Center. Almost immediately I feel a sense of relief. Leaving behind the hooks and snares of life in this new country, we come here for the comfort of pho noodle soup and other aromas from home. I can almost feel its recuperative powers, the full-throated pleasures promised by the simulation of familiar sights and sounds. Authenticity is not the point. Although the car windows are all the way up, I hear Vietnamese music coming from loudspeakers. A beguiling complexity of shops and restaurants lies before us, promising an abundance of nostalgia. Even the food in all its varieties of northern, central, and southern fares, is incidental. For it is nostalgia, the vehement singularity of nostalgia, more than anything else, that brings us here.

Mai glides the car into a tight parking space. She unpacks the wheelchair and positions it by the passenger's side. I am able to walk by myself, with the occasional help of a cane, but I indulge her insistence that I be wheeled instead. I pivot my bottom and sidle onto the wheelchair. The sun is high and the sky is clear, though the grounds are still wet. Mai rolls me toward several sidewalk carts piled with papayas and rambutans, each labeled with a placard that advertises the price accompanied by exclamation marks in bold black markers. O
NLY
O
NE
D
OLLAR
E
ACH!!!!
and
O
NE
D
OLLAR A
P
OUND!!!!

“Do you have longans?” Mai asks the vendor in a convent-schooled voice typical of well-bred Southerners. I note the ease with which she navigates the world.

“Yes. Only one shipment came in this morning. I have not even unpacked the carton,” the vendor replies.

Mai beams. The longans are fat and plump. Swiftly, almost greedily, she picks out several bunches. She does not comparison shop nor does she haggle. “We'll get more than you need so you can share with Aunt An,” she says, leaning close to me.

“Yes, isn't that lovely,” I tell her. I am pleased.

“Goodness,” Mai exclaims when a man accidentally elbows her in his haste to hand out leaflets. She protectively grips the handles on my wheelchair. The man smiles apologetically and asks if we would sign a petition protesting Hanoi's human rights violations. He points to a poster board covered with photographs of mock trials of dissidents. I see color pictures of priests and monks with duct tape over their mouths and military police at their side. A man in the role of judge holds a gavel, pointing it at the accused. Adrenaline charges through me. In this part of the parking lot people walk together in twos and threes, holding banners denouncing Hanoi's repression. There is no paucity of passion or goodwill here. Little Saigon needs the perpetual buzz of Vietnam, even if it is to condemn. Everything before me, Little Saigon itself, is part of war's debris. We are here to reminisce and sometimes to denounce. We are here to salvage something from the ruinous disorder of defeat.

Mai doesn't stop, although I would like her to so I could peruse the leaflets. She pushes my wheelchair, using it to part the crowd. The man persists, rushing ahead and stretching out his arm to slow us down. “Miss, excuse me,” he says agreeably, while his fingers dig into her upper arm. “These are calamitous times in Vietnam. Please. We need your signature.”