The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (41 page)

“Do you have a job yet?” the volunteer asked. Noticing Sanh's embarrassment, she continued, “Because we have some open positions. Would you like to apply? It would help us out tremendously. If we don't fill these jobs, they won't continue to offer them to us.”

“I had some interviews at the resource center,” Sanh said hesitantly. “But I haven't heard anything yet.”

“What did you do in Vietnam?” the volunteer said, sorting through a folder.

“I worked in the foreign ministry,” Sanh said, sitting up. “Press relations. I can speak and translate in three other languages.”

“You can speak English fluently?” The volunteer jotted a note on the yellow pad in front of her. “Would you be interested in working at a school?”

S
AIGON
, V
IETNAM
, 1974

He never expected more out of his job than what he received. Sanh edited and translated press releases for the Foreign Ministry, enjoying a decent salary, regular hours, and enough responsibility that it didn't appear he had avoided enlistment. Even so, Sanh worked diligently. He took his assignments seriously, translating the ministry's announcements into English, French, and Spanish, often staying behind at the office when his coworkers had left for a drink at one of the hotel bars.

He'd received a promotion, of sorts, and an assistant to help with fact checking. Though she wore too much makeup and her perfume irritated his sinuses, especially on humid days, Tuyet performed capably. Every morning, he could expect to find the assignment sheets and contact lists collated on his desk. Though she couldn't help with the translations, she showed an eagerness to acquire a working knowledge of the languages, taking home English or French dictionaries when she left the office.

A naval officer picked her up every afternoon at four o'clock. Tuyet made sure to have her work finished by the time her boyfriend arrived because he did not like to wait. One time, Tuyet was on another floor, gathering a needed signature, and the officer stood by her desk in his stark white uniform. The officer refused the seat Sanh offered, barely looking at him.

“He's a jerk,” his colleague Cung said, after the pair had left one afternoon. “You should ask her to work late one night. Steal her away.” He grinned when Sanh frowned at him. “How else are you going to get a wife? We worry about you, Sanh.”

He did not feel sure he loved Tuyet until the day her mother arrived, interrupting their morning debriefing to yank her out of his office. Until that moment, it never occurred to Sanh that she had a family, someone who could push her around. She had always seemed so independent, opinionated, unafraid to disagree with him or his colleagues during staff meetings. Sanh understood how Tuyet's mother, an older, haughtier version of Tuyet, wearing a turquoise blue
ao dai
and large sunglasses, could make a person cower.

When Tuyet returned, her eyes were swollen. She asked if she could speak to Sanh privately. He invited her into his office, closing the door. Her mother was trying to marry her off to some seventy-year-old American officer who leered at her and her sisters like they were prostitutes.

“He is a terrible man,” Tuyet said, “but he doesn't compare to my mother.” According to Tuyet, her mother ran an opium den, working primarily with Americans. Tuyet's oldest brother, Thang, ran most of the operations, but her mother made all the decisions. With the Communists looming, she wanted to sell her daughter to one of her former clients to get out of Vietnam.

“She kicked me out of our home,” Tuyet said. “I either marry this man or I have nowhere else to go.”

“What about your boyfriend?” Sanh asked.

“Thao?” she said, looking surprised. “He's only a friend. His wife and I were classmates in primary school.” Tuyet wiped her eyes, looking slightly embarrassed. Sanh wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. Walk around his desk and hold her hand? It seemed inappropriate, though he longed to comfort her.

“Do you live with your family?” Tuyet asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“But you're not married. You don't have a girlfriend or fiancée.”

“No.”

Her eyes lifted, so beautiful, intelligent, admiring. They met his. “Do you want to marry me?”

*   *   *

The elementary school did not need to fill a teaching position, the vice principal explained. Teachers in America needed certification. Sanh would require several years of schooling for that. When Sanh explained he'd earned his university diploma with honors in Vietnam, the vice principal, Mr. Gaines, a normally unamused man, smiled.

“This is an interview for a custodial position,” he reminded Sanh. “Carlos can train you. He is excellent with new hires.”

The head custodian was a chubby Guatemalan with a laugh that carried across the schoolyard. He offered to share his sandwich and fruit when he realized Sanh hadn't brought a lunch. He was delighted Sanh spoke fluent Spanish and teased his accent, promising to correct his European pronunciations. Carlos had arrived in the States twelve years earlier and had four children of his own, but they did not attend this school. “Not the same district,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn't want my kids to see how these children act. Very spoiled. No manners.”

During the seven-hour school session, Sanh covered the lower division east wing, mopping and stocking bathrooms and tidying hallways and corridors. After the three o'clock school bell, he was permitted to enter the classrooms, where he emptied the metal trash cans, gathered crumpled paper and stray pencils from the coat closets, and pried off fresh chewing gum from underneath the desks. While restocking the boys' bathroom, he smelled something rank, approached the fourth stall, and saw someone had missed the toilet while defecating. Glad that Carlos and the other custodians were cleaning the other wings, Sanh tensed his fingers around the stall door, slamming his forehead into it so he would not cry.

When he arrived home, Tuyet was annoyed that he'd forgotten to pick up a package of vermicelli noodles at the Chinese grocery store near the school. “I guess we'll just eat rice again tonight,” she said, throwing open the kitchen cabinets, searching for the rice cooker, “even though it took me hours to make the broth. But who cares what I do all day?”

Sitting on the floor, Sanh watched as Lum turned the pages of his coloring book, pointing to the green and blue crayon markings on a pair of skunks. When his son tried to put an orange crayon into his mouth, Sanh gently pulled it away from his face and back toward the coloring book. He tried not to take Tuyet's mood personally. All day, she'd been trying to sew a bag of blouses, some work she picked up from Mrs. Nguyen, another refugee who lived down the hall who convinced her it was easy money. Having never sewn much before, Tuyet had already ruined the stitching in two blouses, which would be deducted from her pay.

“I don't think I should stay at the school,” Sanh said. “I think I can find something better.”

“It's a starter job,” Tuyet said, measuring rice into the cooker. “After a few months, you can ask for a promotion to teach in the classroom.”

“It doesn't work that way,” Sanh said. “Carlos has been there for almost five years and he still cleans toilets.”

“Carlos doesn't have a college degree like you do,” Tuyet said. “We need to be patient. You prove yourself, they'll reward you. Did you go to the refugee center to ask about the sponsorship forms?”

“When was I going to do that?”

“You know we have to file those papers soon. I wrote to my mother weeks ago.”

“I'll go tomorrow,” he promised, closing his eyes, suddenly aware of his aching shoulders and calves. He leaned forward, trying to stretch his cramped spine.

She didn't answer him. Silence gave way to the sound of the simmering soup pot, the water faucet turning on and off, and the occasional padding of Tuyet's slippers on the linoleum kitchen floor. Sanh extended his legs in the living room, watching as Lum tried again to eat his crayon.

“No,” Sanh firmly said, pulling the crayon away from his son's face.

“Carrot,” Lum said in English, pointing again to his coloring book, where an upright bunny was munching on the vegetable.

“Yes,” Sanh replied in English. “Carrot, here. But this is a crayon. You can't eat a crayon.”

Only four years old and Lum's English was catching up with his Vietnamese. His son had been attending English courses at the refugee resource center for the past month, and Sanh found his pronunciation so articulate, so precocious, he wanted to call his mother in France. Maybe Lum would take after his father and find languages more addictive than science or mathematics. But Sanh could only call France on Sundays, and even then he only had ten minutes. Overwhelmed with how much he needed to say, he often said very little, hoping, praying that his silence could somehow express how much he missed them.

*   *   *

That night, his family did their best to help Tuyet feel comfortable. At dinner, his mother asked about Tuyet's favorite dish, and promised to pick up the ingredients from the market the next morning. Trinh and Ngoan offered some of their clothing to Tuyet until she could arrange for her belongings to arrive. Even Sanh's father deigned a polite smile and occasional nod when they spoke of their plans for a quiet, simple wedding ceremony.

While the women helped clean up dinner, Sanh joined his father in the alley for a cigarette. The scent of fresh magnolia flowers from his mother's window box mingled with rotting garbage in the dumpster.

“This should be a relief to your mother,” his father said. “Those matchmakers had branded you an eternal bachelor.”

Sanh ignored the insinuation. His parents had hired two matchmakers, both family friends. But after four awkward dinners, with four different, but equally shallow girls who expected Sanh to look and act like his older brothers, Sanh declared that he'd tired of matchmaking.

“She's smarter than anyone you could have found for me,” Sanh retorted.

“I don't doubt that,” Hung said. “She is very, very smart.”

Sanh glared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Hung exhaled a long drag and cocked his head. “She's not in love with you.” He said it with such cheerfulness, such a lack of surprise, that Sanh had to look away.

“You don't know her,” Sanh said. “You haven't even spoken to her.”

“Am I wrong?” Hung asked. “You know I'm not. Why not admit it to your father, if no one else?”

He knew his father was goading him into an argument. It was something he often did, and Sanh fell for it almost every time. Unlike Yen, who enjoyed debating and never took it personally, or Phung, whom their father usually avoided, Hung's deliberate remarks often burrowed into Sanh's memory, keeping him awake and brooding long after everyone in the house had fallen asleep.

“Are you going to oppose the marriage?” Sanh asked.

“When this could be your only shot?” Hung smiled. “No. This is your choice. Perhaps you will surprise me.”

*   *   *

There were times Sanh didn't mind the job, especially when he, Carlos, and the other custodians sat on the basketball courts and shared a cigarette, or when he had a few minutes during the classroom sweeps to peruse the books that Lum and his younger sibling would read and learn from one day. During their weekly call from France, Sanh's father had requested that if the second child was a boy, his name be Etienne. As for a girl, his research continued. Sanh suspected his father chose the name to remind him they should be in France. Thoughts of the new baby lifted Sanh's spirits.

He dreaded lunch duty most. Sanh found the students' young, petulant voices grating, their slang and garbling of their birth language offensive. It frustrated him that some children would mock his accent when walking past him, believing their English to be superior. He hoped to teach Lum and his younger sibling to articulate, to take pride in every word they spoke. The earlier lunch hour for the lower division grades was not as irritating as the later hour with the older children, who were noisier, rowdier, and deliberately messier.

As Sanh tied up two garbage bags, he saw Carlos on the other side of the cafeteria leaning over to pick up a milk carton from the floor. But before he straightened up, a crumpled lunch sack sailed across the room, bouncing off Carlos's hip. When Carlos looked up, trying to determine where the bag came from, only titters came from a table full of fifth-graders. Carlos resumed picking up the stray trash, but Sanh was watching. Only a few seconds later, a boy stood at the table, a bag in his hands, his forearms creating a graceful arc, similar, Sanh recognized, to throwing a basketball. When the boy released the sack into the air, which brushed past Carlos's elbow, Sanh had already crossed the cafeteria.

He hadn't really thought about what he would do or say after reaching the snickering boys, but he did feel immense satisfaction watching their faces tense in terror as he grabbed the back of the boy's shirt.

“What is wrong with you?” Sanh screamed, refusing to let go of the boy's shirt collar as he attempted to squirm out of his grip. “Do you treat your brother this way? Your father?”

Carlos would later tell him that the other boys and girls yelled at Sanh to let go, that their cries had alerted the teacher chaperones on duty, who should have been watching the brats in the first place. But what surprised Sanh was that his attempts to talk to the boy had not even been understood, that of all the languages Sanh could speak, the one he chose was Vietnamese. Gibberish to these American school kids. Ching-chong crazy talk.

In America, the vice principal said, adults could not touch students in a threatening manner, even for disciplinary purposes. It was against the law. Because Sanh was a new refugee, because of all the hardships he and his family had endured from the war and relocation, because he clearly did not understand the rules of his new country, the school would release him from his duties quietly, without alerting the school board. They would talk to the boy's parents and hopefully persuade them to understand. Carlos gave him a ride home after he cleaned out his personal locker and surrendered his school keys and identification card.