Love Like Hate, page 19
In a country with few private rooms, where people live on top of each other, lies and half-truths become the only forms of privacy. People lie because they assume everyone else is a liar. Those who don’t lie must be either saints or idiots, or just plain rude. In this shimmering world of big and small deceits, people often have to snoop and spy to hunt down the illusive truth. There is an instructive story of a poor man who won a lottery. He moved his family into a mansion where each of his thirteen children could have his or her own room at last. For the first time, they could think in silence and examine their firm or flabby flesh in a full-length mirror. They could hear the creak and hum of their own brains, feel the drafts from strange doors being opened. Frightful memories ambushed them sporadically. The oldest boy realized he had a flat chest, a beer belly and no muscles. The oldest girl discovered a condor-shaped birthmark spanning her behind. After a month of daydreaming, reading, masturbating and unbearable loneliness bordering on madness, they all decided to sleep in the same room again.
9 YOU’RE MY FRECKLES
As Hoa left the house one afternoon, Cun followed her on his motorbike. They wove through the mad Saigon traffic to the docks area, where he saw her enter a warehouse. He parked his bike across the street, ducked into a café and sat behind a potted plant to wait for her to come back out. He ordered one iced tea after another. Finally, after half a dozen iced teas, well past sunset, she reappeared with a weird guy with shoulder-length hair and a bushy mustache. The guy wore shades, a black T-shirt and black leather pants. A rich guy, Cun thought. Maybe he’s a drug dealer. Cun followed the couple as they headed back into town. On Thai Van Lung Street, he saw them enter a club called World War III. Too intimidated to go inside, he went home to report to his mother.
Love Like Hate played an excellent set that night. They began with the demented “Born after the Mother Is Buried,” then launched into “A Noise Came to the Door.” The drummer and bassist were in rare form. Urging each other on, they wove intricate figures into the band’s already complex sound. The guitarist surged and pleaded and Quang Trung sang with vehemence. Their snarling, sneering music subjugated the dancing mob and induced from each sorrowful soul fearful, long-lost emotions best left forgotten. Faces and limbs were drenched in sweat, merging, flailing, and eyes were closed or expectant. Mouths were wide open, fragrant, to sing or drink or receive other mouths. Each body, each self, was cocooned by four or five others, and it was fruitless to try to delimit where one ceased and another began. Drowned in music, Hoa felt that nothing existed outside of that throbbing, sweet room. She felt launched on a drunken joyride into the darkest, deepest night after which no dawn would ever come. But the musicians, exhausted, finally had to stop playing after the trippy “You’re My Freckles.” When the lights were turned on at last, everyone appeared startled. Grinning and disheveled, they looked at each other with disappointment and embarrassment, as if they had just been suckered into something.
Saigon by night loses its blinding glare, mugginess, sharp edges and elbows. Less overwhelming, it becomes more intimate and forgiving. The entire city turns into a raunchy street party promising diversions, sin and drunkenness. Riding home alone that night, with a warm wind blowing on her face, her mind swimming with melodies, Hoa thought that a life with Quang Trung would be just about perfect. There would be music and conversations and trips overseas. Even if he wasn’t rich, she would still desire him, because there would still be the music and the conversations. It’s time to tell Mom about Quang Trung, Hoa decided. She’ll be superdisappointed that he’s not a Viet Kieu, and he’s eleven years older than I am, and she’ll probably think he looks a bit weird, but once she gets to know him a bit, everything will be fine. He’s smart and considerate and rich, which is, to be honest, her main criterion. He’s probably richer than most Viet Kieus out there. In any case, I’m not really looking for her approval, I’m telling her just to be nice. It’s really an ultimatum. I’ll do it first thing in the morning.
Back at World War III, now empty of revelers, Quang Trung sat at the bar with a Jack to think things over. In the mirror, his face looked worn-out, his eyes bloodshot. All that singing and boozing had taken their toll. He was twenty-eight going on forty. Things between him and Hoa had accelerated in the last two weeks or so. He didn’t need Mrs. Cloudy to see what was coming. Lately, Hoa had filled him in on her entire family background. She described her chess-playing father and her cretinous half brother. She declared that her mom liked Han Mac Tu, as if that would impress him. Once, she even said “our family” when talking about her own family. I’m a little too young to stop freelancing, Quang Trung thought, but hell, it has to happen sooner or later. I’ve had enough fun, I suppose. I’ve been running around ridiculing other men for being irresponsible, for not being men, so it’s time I become one. A man, I mean. In the past, I always had an excuse to dump a girl, usually for lying or cheating, or for demanding that I kowtow to her stupid parents before I unzip her stonewashed jeans, but I’m a rock ‘n’ roller, man—it’s all about unleashing your id, isn’t it? I’ve introduced so many girls to their G-spots and their Thanatos, and I’ve done the same with Hoa, I suppose, but she’s really special, there’s no bullshit in her. She understands and trusts me. When I talk about this and that, she understands or tries to understand—there’s real depth to her. She’s like a cave that’s unexplored and uninhabited, no bats or nothing, but there’s real depth there. I guess I’ll have to meet her parents soon. If only girls came without their parents! As soon as a girl reaches eighteen, her parents should just drop dead, not get run over by a truck or anything, just die peacefully in their bed as the clock strikes midnight on her eighteenth birthday. He paused in his cogitation to call the bartender. The middle-aged man poured him another glass. They were the only two left in the bar. Who needs in-laws anyway? he continued. They’ve already fulfilled their primary function, that of delivering Hoa to me, and it’s not like they’ve done such a great job either. I mean, she’s great and everything, but whatever goodness she has is due to her own sweet nature, to her chemistry, so to speak, and not to how they raised her. Her mom sounds like a complete moron. I mean, what the hell is Paris by Night?! But I guess that’s what love is. Love means you’ll have to deal with her stupid mom and her entire family, and not once or twice but forever. I only want to marry the daughter, not fuck the old lady, but I guess I’ll have to sleep with both of them, figuratively speaking, of course. If I love Hoa, that is. Emptying his shot, Quang Trung wiped his mouth, then shouted, “And I do!”
“Did you call me?”
“I do! I do! I do!”
The bartender shook his head. He was washing the glasses and ashtrays behind the bar. He had a wife and three kids at home, none employed. Each night he had to watch a bunch of fuckups get smashed while he stayed sober. By the time he climbed into bed, his wife would be fast asleep, or pretending to be asleep. Looking at Quang Trung, he wearily said, “I think it’s time for you to go home, rock ‘n’ roller.”
10 A HAIRCUT
Having caught Hoa red-handed, Cun marched into Paris by Night with a satisfied and angry face. Worshipping Hoa, his mother had showered her with attention and money, but the girl had turned out to be nothing but a slut hanging out with drug dealers. Cun hated how his mother always talked to Hoa with one voice, all concern and sweetness, and to him with another. He hated Hoa’s slick, dolled-up, American look, her English exercise books lying about the house, her American music on the boom box. Everything about her was foreign to him. It was like having a foreigner living in the house. Seeing Kim Lan, Cun practically shouted. There were many customers present but he didn’t care. This was his moment of triumph.
“I saw Hoa’s boyfriend all right. The guy was a creep in leather pants and shades. He’s probably a pimp or a drug dealer.”
“Did you confront the guy?!”
“Of course not. He looked like a pimp. He probably carries a knife or something.”
Sen interrupted his chess game. “So where is she?”
“She’s in one of those backpackers’ bars on Thai Van Lung Street. It has an English name. I wrote it down.”
Sen said to Kim Lan, “See what you’ve done? You encouraged her. Discos and bars! It’s unbelievable! What kinds of people do you expect her to find in there?!”
Her head spinning, her face red, Kim Lan did not respond to Sen, but started walking out the door. “Let’s go,” she said to Cun. “Take me there right now.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sen said. “You can’t go there and make a scene in public. Just wait a few hours. She will be back soon enough. Why don’t you go upstairs and rest? I’ll bring her up to you when she gets home.”
Sen felt strangely invigorated. He hadn’t been that angry in a while. Or rather, he hadn’t acted that angry in a while. Too agitated to play chess, he killed the next several hours by drinking one beer after another. “When a stick is bent,” he mumbled to himself, “you must bend it back.”
When Hoa returned and entered the café, everything seemed normal until she saw her father’s scowling face. Cun was behind the till with an even more pronounced smirk than usual.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Cun answered.
“Your mom wants to talk to you,” Sen said as he grabbed Hoa by the wrist.
“What’s wrong?”
Sen responded by tightening his grip and dragging Hoa behind him. He yanked her up the stairs. Seeing Hoa enter the room, Kim Lan walked up to her and, without words or hesitation, smacked her hard across the face. It was a move she had been rehearsing in her head for hours. Order has to be restored. Pampered for so long, the girl thinks she can do whatever she wants. Enough. I’ll have to knock the foolishness out of her. Hoa was struck with such force that she fell backward and collapsed in a corner. Outraged, her eyes blurry, she looked up at her mom’s changed face. It was hard and ugly, like painted concrete, fixed in its fury. Hoa was shocked at the amount of spite and rage contained in it. This new face erased all previous versions. Hoa covered her own face and cried. Her mom had never hit her before. Even Sen was a little shocked, yet all he said was, “You disappointed your mother. You betrayed your mother’s trust.”
That night Hoa was kept locked in a room without any sharp instrument or even a plastic bag. If she had had anything convenient, she would have used it. She sobbed all night until her eyes were puffed shut and her head pounded. She felt very thirsty, but there was no water. Toward dawn she finally fell asleep. She dreamed that she was on her motorbike returning home, just like the night before, but it was raining hard. She tilted her head up to drink the rain, but somehow all the drops managed to miss her wide-open mouth. Below her, the street was flooding, and cold, dirty water quickly rose to her knees, then her stomach, then her chest. Calmly, she accelerated her motorbike and it surfaced like a Jet Ski, swerving around thousands of bobbing heads about to drown. They don’t call it a wave for nothing, she thought, pleased by her knowledge of English. Desperate arms reached out to grab her, clutching at her clothes, but she sped right by them. Within sight of home, her motorbike sputtered and sank as it ran out of gas. Unseen hands grabbed at her as she started to swim. As she kicked and struggled, water rushed into her nostrils but not her mouth. Someone punched her hard in the face, the hardest she had ever been hit, the hardest she could imagine anyone being hit. “Mom! Mom!” she screamed. “Help me! Help me!” She opened her eyes in panic and saw with tremendous relief, then horror, that she was already in her mother’s house. Staring up at the familiar ceiling, she realized that her mother was the author of her pain, and not her savior.
That morning, a still-angry Kim Lan appeared to announce that Hoa no longer had the key to the motorbike. She was not to leave the house at all, not even to go to the New York School. To make sure his sister would be too ashamed to go outside, Cun barged into the room with a pair of scissors to snip clumps of hair randomly from Hoa’s head. He snapped her head back with one hand and clipped with the other as he called her a slut and a whore. Hoa was too exhausted to scream or resist this dangerous man, her brother. Her father was still sleeping and she wasn’t sure if he would defend her in any case.
11 PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
For years Sen had left Kim Lan alone to educate Hoa. She knew more about these matters, he reasoned. She had finished high school while he had never gotten past the sixth grade. He also understood Kim Lan’s wish to find Hoa a Viet Kieu husband. The only problem was that every other Vietnamese mother also wanted a Viet Kieu son-in-law. Viet Kieu sons-in-law were so desirable that people were actually paying them to marry their daughters. The idea was to use a Viet Kieu son-in-law as a ticket to get a family member to America. Two decades after the Fall of Saigon, the airlift had begun again, with a Viet Kieu son-in-law as the single-passenger jet taking Vietnam’s daughters straight to the land of dreams. He was a three-legged bird with bright plumage swooping down from a glittering sun to pluck his teary-eyed maiden from the smoldering ashes. Once in America, the daughter could rake in the bucks and recoup the initial investment a thousand times over. She could also bring other family members over. The going rate for a Viet Kieu son-in-law in 2004 was around twenty-five thousand bucks, half of which usually went to a middle man. It wasn’t a foolproof racket because US immigration authorities were becoming expert at sniffing out these fake marriages. To make them less fake, the fake couples often went through the rituals of a normal courtship—a stroll through the Saigon Zoo, sunbathing in Vung Tau, a romantic meal in a restaurant—but telescoped into a few days and treated merely as photo opportunities. A wedding reception had to be staged, complete with fake guests, or guests could be borrowed from a real wedding. The fake couple would crash someone else’s reception at a busy restaurant, snap a few quick photos, then disappear before anyone knew what was happening. They also had to stand in front of the altar, clasping incense sticks in front of their foreheads, to ask for blessings from their ancestors. The idea was to have convincing photographic evidence to trick US immigration.
When is your husband’s birthday?
What is the color of his underwear?
What is your mother-in-law’s name?
What does your husband like to eat?
Does he smoke or drink alcohol?
Are you a Communist or a terrorist?
Have you ever been paid for sex?
Sometimes these fake couples even fucked for real because the Viet Kieu sons-in-law—who held the trump card, after all—were simply too horny not to. To these dudes, the wrongness of it all was no deterrent, but only a bonus thrill, belated bangers and mash and payback for all those nights of kneeling in front of the computer in some ice-packed, deep-frozen city of North America, mooning at digitized pussies. Sometimes the girl got pregnant, resulting in a quick abortion, or not. A pregnancy was actually welcomed by some families, since it provided a more definitive proof of the staged marriage’s authenticity. In any case, the poor had to borrow astronomical sums if they wanted to play this game. Sen thought that this Viet Kieu business was too risky a gamble. After dinner one night, while picking at his relatively new dentures and spitting discolored flecks of imperfectly masticated animal tissue onto the floor, Sen decided that a much safer bet was to find a Taiwanese son-in-law. He already had one in mind.
12 A CEO
By 2004, the Taiwanese had become the ugly foreigners in Vietnam. They were rich, they swaggered and the prostitutes loved them. Some had come to do business but most were there only to shop for a woman. A few had picked out their brides on the internet, and were in Saigon to pick up the goods. Unlike many Viet Kieus, the Taiwanese didn’t charge, but paid relatively good money to marry a Vietnamese woman. Most of these bachelors were old, ugly, diseased or handicapped. The Vietnamese press loved to ridicule this phenomenon. One article began:
A surprising thing about the groom, T.D.C. (a Taiwanese), was that, although he was not famous, he was always accompanied by two “bodyguards.” They were always by his side to assist him … take each step. That’s because he was ninety years old! No one will dare toast “a hundred years of happiness” to the newlyweds. The bride, N.T.L. (from Bac Lieu), was only thirty.
The goal of the brides was to live in a nice Taiwanese house and to send money back to their parents regularly. These fantasies were darkened somewhat by rumors of women who went to Taiwan only to be sold to whorehouses, and of women being forced to sleep with a father-in-law or brother-in-law. To play it safe, some women would defraud their suitors by disappearing after a sumptuous wedding.
“An immigrant is an unenlightened ignoramus who thinks one country better than another.” So wrote an unenlightened Ambrose Bierce. But how does one compare two countries? By income, the average Taiwanese made $13,320 in 2003, thirty times more than the average Vietnamese. The life expectancies for Taiwanese were age seventy-four for men, eighty for women; for Vietnamese, sixty-eight and seventy-three. Suicide rates were not available for either country. Further, it has often been noted that the average Taiwanese tends to laugh louder and longer than the average Vietnamese, slap his thigh with more gusto, and become much more boisterous when drunk.
An optical scanner for measuring the gleam in the eye was invented by Dr. Hideo Suzuki of Kobe University. The more gleam, the more happiness. Scanning eyes from across the globe, Dr. Suzuki was able to determine that adolescents anticipating their first sexual experience had the most gleam, and Vietnamese of whatever age, in any situation whatsoever, the least. (Those who doubt Dr. Suzuki’s findings should rewind to the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics, when the Vietnamese delegation entered the stadium absolutely stone-faced, without any gleam in their eyes whatsoever, their deadened demeanor a bizarre contrast to the joyful exuberance displayed by the crowd as well as the athletes and officials from the other 201 nations.)
