Love Like Hate, page 17
“Everything grows up, Hoa!”
The girls accused each other of wearing padded bras. One girl, Loan, had the annoying habit of always touching Hoa’s breasts while saying, “Are they real?” She made up for it by buying Hoa ice cream and yogurt. Loan was a source of weird facts she culled from God knows where. “Hoa, did you know that Cantonese slang for a woman is tofu?”
“I can see that: tofu is soft, just like a woman.”
“And it moves like a woman.”
“Tofu doesn’t move!”
“If you lick it, it does.”
“Who licks tofu?!”
“Many people do, Hoa. Tofu stuffed with ground beef is nice but tofu by itself is also nice. There’s nothing better in the world than two pieces of tofu smothered in coconut milk sweetened by brown sugar, then sprinkled with slivers of ginger.”
“That sounds really delicious. I’ve never tried that. I didn’t know you were a cook. I usually eat my tofu deep-fried.”
“Deep-fried tofu! That’s disgusting.” Loan leaned closer to Hoa and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. Her peppermint breath was not unpleasant. “Did you know, Hoa, that women in China used to stuff a special mushroom into a penis-shaped pouch, then soak it in warm water? The slimy mushroom would swell, filling the pouch, making it ready to use.”
“Ready to use for what?”
“Hoa, do you have to ask?!”
“You don’t mean they used it for that!”
“But you don’t even know what that is!”
The girls dubbed themselves the Metallicas because they were all into heavy metal. They bought and lent each other pirated CDs of Megadeth, Rhapsody, Liquid Tension Experiment, Pain of Salvation, etc. Hoa loved heavy metal for its rage and energy. It had balls and spine and contrasted sharply with the moaning dirges her mother drowned in at home. When Kim Lan bitched about Hoa’s new taste in music, she barked right back, “It’s American music, Mama! It’s what American kids listen to!” There were a handful of garage bands in Saigon, a city with almost no garages. The most famous was the Yellows. Hoa enjoyed their music well enough, but she found their lyrics ridiculous. They sang of friendship and lost love, not exactly metal material. Though they had adopted a new sound, they were stuck with the old sentiments. More to her taste was a band called Love Like Hate. It wasn’t heavy metal, but punk, someone told her. Like many girls, she also found the lead singer, Quang Trung, hot. He had the coolest tattoo she had ever seen: an upside-down map of Vietnam on his right biceps.
Love Like Hate was the house band at World War III, just down the street from Apocalypse Now. Hoa arrived early every Saturday night to claim a stool at the end of the bar, right next to the stage. She would chat to Quang Trung during the sound check and look at him adoringly during the show. Everyone assumed she was his girlfriend even before she became his girlfriend. During a break between sets one night, Quang Trung was at the bar drinking a Jack on the rocks. He stood so close to Hoa, he could smell her perfume and feel her breath on his cheek. He also felt, unmistakably, the pressure of her left thigh leaning against his. Between sips, he turned and saw her eyes glistening. She stared straight into his eyes without blinking. The red light made her face glow like burning coal. Knowing this was the right moment, he kissed her hard on the lips, their tongues touching. “I want to see you naked,” he said, before he leaped back onstage.
Kim Lan tolerated Hoa going to the rock-and-roll bars because she assumed those places were hopping with Viet Kieus. You can’t wait for a Viet Kieu to come to your door, she reasoned, you must go to them.
“Have you met a nice Viet Kieu at the bar, Hoa?”
“Yes, I’ve met many, but I haven’t found anyone to my liking.”
“Don’t be too choosy. Just pick a Viet Kieu about your age. A little older is OK too, even ten years older.”
“Don’t worry, Mama. There are plenty of Viet Kieus at those places. I’ll find one sooner or later.”
The truth was that there were hardly any Viet Kieus at those rock-and-roll joints. They were frequented mostly by expats and the children of the nouveau riche. Lonely Viet Kieu men preferred the hostess bars, where they could get laid for the price of two or three shots of Jack Daniel’s.
5 MOTHER VIETNAM
Quang Trung’s parents were nouveau riche. His father was a high-ranking customs officer who received kickbacks every which way for all the smuggling flowing in and out of the country. They had an American-style house in Thu Duc, complete with a two-car garage and a swimming pool. Quang Trung used his father’s money to buy whatever he wanted and to travel the world—he had been all over Europe and Asia—but he had never paid for a woman. He could get his for free, he reasoned, so why go to a sleazy hostess bar just to get laid? Quang Trung also used his father’s money to buy books. He read widely yet randomly. He had enough English to read Hemingway with the help of a dictionary. He watched foreign films and was familiar with Tarkovsky, Fellini and Fassbinder. In Paris, he met Tran Anh Hung. They hit it off and stayed in touch via email.
Living in such an impoverished, degraded country, Quang Trung justified his privileged status by becoming an artist. Buying into this rationalization, he never apologized for his expensive lifestyle. The idea was to spend whatever was necessary to become a better artist. A weekend junket to Hong Kong was warranted because it stimulated and added to his knowledge of Hong Kong. His father earned money crookedly, sure, but this corruption of the father was serving to elevate the son. An artist could not waste money simply because money could not be wasted on an artist. He should be showered with money, as much money as possible, even blood money. From Dostoyevsky, he gleaned the crucial insight that everything and everyone in an artist’s life has been granted by providence to serve him, or rather, his art, so long as he remains an artist. This is only fair since an artist gives so much back, to so many more people. It would be foolish, ungrateful and a shirking of responsibility to decline any freebie from above. Even if he turned out to be an artistic failure, Quang Trung reasoned, he had at least provoked and/or annoyed other artists. Bad art highlighted, even defined, good art. Even the most deluded, incompetent artist had his reason to be. His own reason to be, Quang Trung had come to believe, was to peer under what was under, to lift the heavy carpet of civilization, at least the Vietnamese one, grimy as it was with mishaps and murders, and expose many centuries’ worth of frass, secrets and lost change. Hoa had never encountered anyone like Quang Trung. She didn’t know there were people like Quang Trung in the world.
Quang Trung explained to Hoa that he called his band Love Like Hate because that was how he felt about Vietnam. “I love Vietnam so much I hate her. How can I not hate her when I love her so much? I am like a son who froths at the mouth because he has to watch his mother sell her pussy. She’s sold her pussy to the Chinese, French, Russians and Americans, and now she’s selling it to the Taiwanese. She’d sell her pussy to anyone because she feels inferior to everyone. She’s thrilled to be humiliated because someone is paying attention to her. And when she’s too old to sell her own pussy, she sells her daughter’s pussy. That’s Mother Vietnam for you!”
He then sang sarcastically, “Mother Vietnam with her brilliant eyes! Hears the echoes of peace nearby! Gentle mother with her glittering eyes! Hears her son is still alive! It’s all bullshit, don’t you understand?”
Quang Trung blamed Vietnam’s sorry state on its men. “The men have been in charge and they’ve fucked up everything. They beat their wives, go to the whorehouses and come home drunk at the end of the day. They’re vicious yet feeble because they have never had to prove themselves worthy of their women. It’s that Confucianism shit and Vietnamese women are so sick of it. That’s why they’ll marry any foreigner who comes along just to get the fuck out of the country. That’s a fate worse than prostitution. A prostitute only sells her body for parts of the day, but if you marry someone just to leave the country, or for money, you’re selling your body twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life!”
“Or until you divorce him!”
Quang Trung cringed and declared in a challenging way, “If you sell your body, that’s bad, but if you sell your soul, that’s even worse.”
“Who doesn’t know that already?”
“Many people!”
“I know that!”
When Quang Trung ranted, he reminded Hoa a lot of Sky. She agreed with many of his observations, but hearing him run his mouth still gave her a headache. She preferred to hear him talk about his travels.
“Are European cities dirty, Quang Trung?”
“Only Naples and Brussels, but Naples is very exciting, just like Saigon, and very beautiful too.”
“Are there prostitutes?”
“Enough. The whores there like to wear vinyl, leather and fishnet stockings.”
“Sounds good to me! I wouldn’t mind dressing like that. I bet you I’d look fantastic in orange vinyl. I’d be so smooth and shiny!”
“Stop joking around. In Western Europe, many of the whores are from the old Communist countries. In Amsterdam, the prostitutes were all Russians and Romanians. I could tell they weren’t Dutch just by looking at their foreheads.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how Vietnamese heads bulge out in the back?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Dutch heads bulge out in the front. I also saw African and Asian whores in Amsterdam. You see, when you’re dirt-poor, that’s all you have to sell. I walked into a go-go bar in Munich and both of the girls dancing were Asian. One was Thai, the other Filipino. I went to dozens of go-go bars in Europe, but never saw American or Japanese girls dancing. That’s because they’re rich!”
“But not all Americans and Japanese are rich!”
“I agree. But at least they’re not desperate enough to go overseas to sell their pussies.”
“But why did you go to those go-go bars? I thought you hated to see people selling their bodies.”
“They weren’t selling their bodies, Hoa. They were selling the appearance of their bodies.”
“But who doesn’t?!” Hoa replied, a little annoyed. “But you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to see who works in those joints.” Quang Trung smiled. “I also wanted to see what the men in there were like.”
“And what were they like?”
“They were hungry and miserable and they wanted to be hugged!”
Hoa thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t think you should blame poor women for prostituting themselves.”
“I’m not blaming the women—I think prostitution should be legalized, as a matter of fact—but I’m condemning any society in which women have little choice but to become prostitutes. The red-light district in Amsterdam is tiny, but all of Saigon is a red-light district.”
“You’re right. Whenever I sit on a public bench by myself, men ride up on their motorbikes and say, ‘You’re coming with me, little sister?’ They all think I’m a whore! But no one is forced to become a prostitute. A girl can always find work as a domestic servant.”
“But a domestic servant is a slave, and who wants to be a slave?”
“I, for one, don’t treat my domestic servants as slaves. I rarely yell at them and I give them all my old clothes. We watch TV together and we even eat out together.”
Quang Trung was so charmed by this response, he stopped talking. Smiling, he leaned toward Hoa and gave her a big kiss.
Quang Trung had a loft by the river he divided into a practice studio and a bachelor pad. Hoa came there almost every day. She loved to just lie on his bed and listen to Blondie, Grace Jones, Burning Spear or the Butthole Surfers. She liked most of Quang Trung’s CDs except the jazz ones. Music without singing was too alien a concept to her. Hoa could easily have imagined moving in and staying forever, maybe without telling her parents. They would panic and wonder where she had gone. I’ve moved to the dark side of the moon, she thought with pleasure, borrowing an image from Pink Floyd. I’m writing to you from a faraway country. Music took her places, or at least it removed her from Vietnam. Grooving to Shonen Knife or Control Machete, she felt liberated momentarily from her native society. With the AC on full blast, she imagined what it must be like to live in a cold climate, where words like “coziness” and “warmth” must have entirely different meanings. To live in a cold country was to be chilled by the AC even when out-of-doors. Every so often, sometimes twice a day, a blackout would happen, shutting down the AC, lights and music. Plunged into darkness, silence and heat, Hoa was reminded that she was still very much a citizen of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It’s a real bitch to be born into a closet-sized country, she thought. A tiny country is like a tiny prison: One is shut off from the rest of the world and knows it.
When Kim Lan asked her where she had been, Hoa always lied. Her job was to go out and hook a Viet Kieu so she could fly to America, not sleep with some punk rocker with an upside-down tattoo on his arm, even if he was superrich. Hoa could just hear her mom’s shrill voice yelling, “His father is a crook and will go to jail before you know it!”
Hoa never gave Quang Trung her address or phone number. She didn’t even dare to call him from home because her mom always lurked in the background whenever Hoa picked up the phone. She did say that her mom owned a café called Paris by Night. Even this spurred him into a tirade. “Paris by Night?! To call a Vietnamese café in Saigon Paris by Night is absurd! That’s just typical! Typical! Tell your mom the French left half a century ago!”
“My mom thinks it sounds classy and intellectual.”
“Intellectual?!” He shook his head, disgusted.
Hoa had never seen anyone with so many books as Quang Trung. She came from a home with no books, only a few tattered magazines. She hadn’t thought a mind could contain more than a dozen books. To buy more than a dozen books was sheer vanity and a criminal waste of money, she thought, like having too many pairs of shoes while children were starving. She stared at the hundreds of books lining Quang Trung’s shelves. “Have you read all of these?”
“Most of them.”
“Why read so many books?”
“Because I don’t want to be an idiot.”
“I haven’t read any books. Am I an idiot then?”
“No, you’re a young woman who hasn’t had a chance to read books.”
“My mom hasn’t read any books either. Is she an idiot?”
“No, she’s Mother Vietnam! She already knows everything.”
Reading Quang Trung’s books at random, Hoa became very fond of Ho Bieu Chanh. She had seen his books before, at street stalls among displays of chewing gum, nuts and candies, and had assumed they were cheap romances because of their lurid covers. But Quang Trung told her that Ho Bieu Chanh was a very serious and prolific writer, someone who had produced sixty-four novels over a five-decade career. He also wrote plays, short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and travel books. Ho Bieu Chanh was one of a handful of extraordinary men from the first half of the twentieth century who tried with superhuman effort to modernize Vietnam through literature. By exposing age-old vices and idiocies, they hoped people would slowly change. Their influences remained subtle. Reading a Ho Bieu Chanh novel from 1935, Hoa noticed that the society he depicted was dominated by lust, greed, deceit and abuse of power, just like it was today, only peopled with characters who walked and talked a little slower. One day Quang Trung saw Hoa reading a slim novel by Pham Thi Hoai.
“Do you like her? She’s the best Vietnamese writer on the planet. She lives in Berlin.”
“Have you met her?”
“Yeah. I met her and her German husband. The guy speaks excellent Vietnamese.”
“Will I get to meet them someday?
“What do you mean?”
“Will you take me to Germany to meet them?”
Quang Trung smiled. “Only if you say yes.”
Hoa did not answer, she only blushed, because everything was understood.
6 LOVING DOLPHINS
One beautiful Saturday morning Hoa and Quang Trung took a hydrofoil to Vung Tau. The stretch of the river connecting Saigon to the sea boasts some of the loveliest landscapes in all of Vietnam. Sampans paddled by feet bobbled in the shadows of mangrove forests. Much of what greets the eye is lush green, unmarred by human habitats, a true rarity in an overflowing country. At the mouth of the ocean, bright sky and shimmering sea merge into a single liquid universe, with the warm wind still blowing in your face.
With 2,143 miles of coastline, Vietnam has many beautiful beaches. Although Nha Trang, Ca Na and Phan Thiet all boast finer beaches, Vung Tau is by far the most popular resort in Vietnam, thanks to its proximity to Saigon. During the war, Saigon residents had two options for a quickie holiday: Da Lat, for its cool weather, pine trees and lakes, and Vung Tau. Although it hosted a huge American installation, the Vietcong never shelled it. The joke was that the VC wanted to keep the city safe for their own vacationing officers.
At one end of the city is a pair of gigantic cement Buddhas, sitting and reclining on a hill. At the other end is a gigantic cement Jesus, arms outspread, standing on another hill. Beneath this rip-off of Rio’s Hey-Zeus is Back Beach, the main bathing area. In a country where palm trees are ubiquitous, Back Beach actually has none. They’ve all been cut to make room for the widened road and the hideous-looking guesthouses and restaurants. It doesn’t matter: the sand is reasonably clean, the water warm, and all your earthly needs will be catered to you right on the beach. From the itinerant vendors you can order crab, shrimp, ice cream, lychees, durians, snails, a plate of green papaya with beef jerky, rice with pork chops, or a bowl of crab and tomato soup. You can even have your fortune read by a wandering fortune-teller.
After checking into a minihotel, Hoa and Quang Trung relaxed on two beach chairs, drinking iced beer and eating shrimp cooked in beer. Hoa wore a maroon two-piece with large daisies. The bikini was mostly string, with scarce room for the daisies. Quang Trung wore a blue Aquablade brief. In a country where female bathers sometimes wade into the ocean in pajamas, Hoa was drawing quite a bit of attention with her smooth form and meager thread. Dreading dark skin, most Vietnamese women shun both sun and sea, the only two things their country has plenty of. Exposed to the elements, their pores open, the young couple’s nakedness was warmed by the maternal sun and stroked and tickled by the sea breeze.
