Love Like Hate, page 6
5 HUNCHES AND BELIEFS
After their marriage, it was decided that Kim Lan should quit tending wounds and stay at home. “You should not be around death all the time,” Hoang Long said. She was more than ready to leave the blood buckets and maggots behind. She would not miss the incoming, and gurneys gliding on blood. She didn’t want to hear words like “triage” or “trauma” ever again. Near death, a soldier, his face burned, his eyes useless, confused her with his wife. Another, clutching her hand, took her for his mother. Being a nurse had not persuaded Kim Lan that pain was a normal human condition. She still considered it an aberration, a freak occurrence afflicting only the most unfortunate.
The young couple bought a two-room house in the Thanh Da district on the edge of town. There you could hear the distant booms of outgoing artillery and occasionally, close by, incoming ones. To make up for her lost income, Kim Lan decided to open a café in their home. Saigon, then as now, was a city with a million cafés. You could not walk a few steps without running into one. They all had beach chairs facing the street, so patrons could laze under awnings to watch life go by as they imbibed caffeine, nicotine and nitrogen dioxide. Beggars and shoe-shine boys drifted in and out, while motorbikes, cyclos, tanks and ambulances paraded past. Every so often there would be an accident, a fight or an explosion to provide perspective and excitement. Kim Lan named her café Kim Long, which means Golden Dragon. “I like that!” Hoang Long said, chuckling.
Marrying her had indeed turned him into a golden dragon. Before, he was just another lonely short guy with an attitude, but now he had real confidence and class. She made him look and feel significant whenever they were seen together. Other men’s stares embarrassed her, yet flattered him. Taller, better-looking men were constantly wondering how in hell such a short, ugly man had managed to attract such an attractive woman. They looked at the couple in envy and disgust and wondered if they had made a mistake with their own marriages. That evening they went home and picked a ridiculous argument with their wives.
Three years before he was married, Hoang Long had gone to a fortune-teller, Mrs. Cloudy—so-called because of her milky, pupil-less eyes. Everyone consulted her, including high government officials, prominent businessmen and the station chief of the CIA. Her blindness only added to her reputation for clairvoyance. After making an appointment two weeks in advance, clients had to crowd into a waiting room like those at dentists’ offices, with the overflow spilling onto the sidewalk. Many Vietnamese have never felt a dentist’s probe, but they have seen half a dozen fortune-tellers. In the air-conditioned parlor, Mrs. Cloudy, a regal fifty-year-old dressed in white silk, sat in a rattan armchair, a black mutt dozing by her feet. A boy servant stood near, ready to pour tea. She stopped puffing on her Dunhill, traced the minute lines on Hoang Long’s palms with her right thumb, then began, “Let’s see, your face is slightly asymmetrical, but that’s a distinction to be cherished. You are quite short also, but that’s OK. You will find a smudgy facsimile of conjugal happiness, something akin to love, but not this year or the next. You will go far away and it will be a learning experience. Hold on: I can clearly see a wrinkled body, with all of its limbs intact and both eyes securely lodged in their sockets, lying in a state-of-the-art casket, complete with a drainage system. That’s pretty good news, isn’t it? That means you will live to old age and not suffer a violent death. Hold on: I can clearly see that you will be humiliated in Chapter 30. I’m sorry but you can’t change this destiny, it’s already published. After marriage, money will roll in.” Mrs. Cloudy said many more things that night, but since we weren’t there, we can’t possibly know what they were.
Mrs. Cloudy’s mind was a vast repository of other people’s misfortunes: terminal diseases, gunshots, stab wounds, car crashes and bone-crunching, blood-splattering falls from ladders, cliffs and windows. Funeral after funeral coursed through her feverish head. They tailgated or collided into each other at busy intersections. Dozens of funerals merged into one, not to be disentangled except at the cemetery. Her eardrums vibrated continuously with the sounds of weeping, sniveling and howling. When it came to her own death, however, Mrs. Cloudy was clueless. “A fortune-teller cannot tell her own fortune,” she’d say matter-of-factly. “And I’m too proud to go see another fortune-teller.”
Knowing one’s destiny, one became a slave to one’s given plot, whether it was glorious then terrifying, or just continuously terrifying, an upside-down roller-coaster ride through the never-spoken-about and the unshowable. Knowing the arc of one’s own life, one could only subvert it by means of annoying and desperate tangents, but Mrs. Cloudy preferred to fumble through each chapter, reading her novel as she wrote it. Remove the uncertainties and there would be no imagination, hope or frisson. That was why Mrs. Cloudy occasionally gave her cowardly clients wrong predictions, to make their lives more interesting down the road.
With great success came great jealousy, of course, and there was a rival who claimed that Mrs. Cloudy was not really blind, that she was only a masseuse masquerading as a fortune-teller. Then this other woman was run over by an M48 tank at a famous intersection. After that, no one dared to repeat the slander.
Regarding Hoang Long, Mrs. Cloudy was at least right about money rolling in after marriage. Stationed in Cao Lanh, one hundred miles from Saigon, he could come home every three months for a one-week stay. Each time he showed up, he took from his knapsack a nice stack of money. Soldiers under his command were bribing him to keep them out of harm’s way. The ones who couldn’t pay were assigned point-man duty or other dangerous tasks. Hoang Long himself was protected by a talisman Kim Lan had procured from a Cambodian monk. It was a cobra’s fang he kept in a pouch strapped across his chest. She also got him a handkerchief blessed with a Cambodian phrase. Before each mission, he’d wipe his face with the handkerchief while mumbling some mumbo jumbo in mispronounced Cambodian. It had worked its magic, apparently, because he had not come close to being maimed since he got married.
Better safe than sorry. It can’t hurt. The gods and demons must be placated, their ghostly pockets stuffed with hell dollars. Like the Chinese, Mexicans and southern Italians, Vietnamese are highly superstitious. They possess an unscientific mind set that allows them to believe just about anything … as long as there is enough poetry in it. To ward off an outbreak of thrush, a child’s first excrement—an odorless yellow slime resembling egg yolk—is smeared into his mouth right after birth. At one month, a boy’s scrotum is caressed upward with a warm hand, to prevent it from sagging. To tighten his nut sack, three pouches of uncooked rice are hung over a door, to be squeezed by those entering the room. For a girl, a heated betel leaf is rubbed on the vagina, to prevent it from flaring. A child with a drowned relative has to wear a brass anklet to ensure against being “dragged” to a similar death later in life. Children under ten are discouraged from looking into mirrors, lest their souls, embodied within the reflected image, should play tricks with them.
Innumerable superstitions guide you from the cradle to the grave. If you don’t squash a snake’s head after you’ve killed it, it will return to bite you three days later. A chunk of cactus, affixed to a door, prevents bad spirits from entering a house. Remove all buttons from a corpse’s clothing or else the spirit won’t be able to leave the coffin. In the home of the recently dead, an X is drawn in chalk on all glass windows, to prevent the ghost from reentering. During the mourning period, strips of white cloth are tied to the legs of chairs and tables, and to plants, since a plant that does not grieve will surely die. When his sales are slow, a coffin maker will sleep inside a coffin to suggest death to the gods, to simulate/stimulate business.
Most interesting are brand-new beliefs, reflecting contemporary life. Some people believe that an X-ray would trim a year or two from your life span. Drinking milk would lighten your skin; ingesting soy sauce would darken it. Discussing a sensational murder, a woman told Kim Lan that if the corpse’s eyes were wide open at the moment of death, the investigation was in the bag. “If they develop the frozen image in his eyes, they can see the murderer’s face.” Eyes were cameras, literally, in this woman’s eyes.
Bay Dom was an ARVN general in charge of the Chau Doc area. It was said that he could not be shot with a bullet. Once he dared an American adviser to shoot him, point-blank, with a pistol. Feeling no special love for the cocky general, the American readily agreed. In front of the general’s own troops, he aimed a .38 Special at Bay Dom’s temple, the mouth of his six-inch barrel practically kissing the other man’s exposed skin. He pulled the trigger twice and heard two loud bangs, but the general still stood there, smirking. On his third attempt, the American’s pistol jammed. Suddenly everyone started to laugh uproariously, including the general and the American. They would later become drinking buddies. The only way to kill Bay Dom, it was said, was to shoot him in the eye or the asshole. Once Bay Dom pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it against his heart, but it would not explode.
6 CHECKMATE!
Where there are no seasons, each day feels pretty much the same. Winter doesn’t come but neither does spring. The leaves don’t change colors and there’s no invigorating first snow. There’s never a blighted sky at midday to lend mood and dignity to madness, only a steady glare to mock all neuroses and despair. In early March, there’s no meek sun emerging to urge the timid seeds from the sullen soil, no trilling bird returning from up north to find its old tree still standing. There are no skeletal branches etched against a slate-colored sky, reindeers shaving roofs and chimneys, Groundhog Days, Oktoberfests, cherry blossoms, or March Madness. Each day there’s the same heat, which can stultify one into thinking that the world is actually permanent and unchanging. Without a gust of arctic wind to chill the bone marrow, some people even forget that their personal winter is fast approaching. Kim Lan established a routine tending to her café and became very fond of many of her customers. Among them was Sen, a Chinese-Vietnamese man recently arrived from Vinh Chau. Cheerful, chatty and always in a brand-new shirt of an outdated fashion, he was an idler who had apparently bribed his way out of military service. His one passion was chess, and he brought a set to her café each day to play against all challengers. He was so good he always had to handicap himself by starting without a rook or a knight. Sen preferred Western chess to the more popular Chinese version. The differences between the two games are crucial. In Chinese chess, the king cannot leave his little area, a symbolic Forbidden City. There’s also a river to cross and no queen. What is chess without the damn queen?! The most powerful piece in Western chess, a queen that can zap you in all directions, doesn’t exist on a Chinese chessboard. Sen’s favorite moment wasn’t checkmate, but when he could finally bag his opponent’s queen. He played quickly and distractedly, jabbering and hardly looking at the board, but the results were nearly always the same. He never competed for exorbitant stakes, lest he bankrupt his opponents, leading to hard feelings, retaliation, or suicide. Once he became a little too distracted and lost his queen early. Concentrating hard, he fought and fought and finally won, infuriating his opponent into cursing and overturning the chessboard. Everyone in the café anticipated an altercation, but Sen kept his composure. He simply sat and stared at his adversary with a peculiar smile on his face. Some interpreted this as amused contempt, others as fear. In any case, the sore loser quickly apologized, picked up all the pieces by himself, paid Sen, then left, never to be seen again. Sen made good money from chess, but Kim Lan had a hunch he already had lots of money. Carefree and leisurely, he seemed determined to sit out the entire war in her café. Months would go by, but he never seemed the least bit bored. She never suspected that he had a secret reason to stay put. Busy with the customers, she never noticed that his eyes were furtively surveying her every inch.
Sen’s spoken Vietnamese was only passable but he was committed to improving it. Too self-conscious to buy a Vietnamese newspaper, he would from time to time peruse those left behind by the other patrons. He could string the lumpy roman letters together, forming sounds in his head, but many words remained opaque. In the Tatler, there was a section called “Car Ran over Dog, Dog Ran over Car.” These brief accounts of accidents employed a limited vocabulary in simple constructions, such as: “An eighteen-wheeler struck a bicycle, killing a sixty-six-year-old coconut vendor.” Knowing all the words except “eighteen-wheeler” and “struck,” Sen could deduce that whatever an “eighteen-wheeler” was, it had killed a coconut vendor by “strucking” his or her bicycle. He also glanced at the battle reports. These were even easier to decipher: “Last night in Kontum, we killed twelve, captured three. Our side suffered three light injuries.” Twelve to three, Sen concluded, so we won!, feeling more Vietnamese with the sentiment. Sen had noticed that many Vietnamese slowed their speech and raised their voices whenever they addressed him. Some even affected vaguely Chinese accents. He appreciated that Kim Lan never did that.
Though economically successful, the Chinese in Vietnam had no social standing. Children sang racist songs about them and their accents were mocked, even on television. In remote Vinh Chau, a tiny village by the coast, Sen’s father had a business raising carp. He was one of the first to use fish feed with growth hormones and his profits were enormous. His carp often grew to the size of dolphins and could swim just as fast. He also had twenty acres of land on which he grew onions and other crops. A first-generation immigrant, he had arrived from Sichuan with nothing more than a straw hat, a shirt and a pair of shorts. He had neither shoes nor slippers. Even when he could afford quality footwear decades later, his splayed toes could not endure being jammed inside a stuffy pair of leather wingtips. Thank God, plastic flip-flops had finally been invented. Aiming for San Francisco, the old man had settled for Vietnam. He was satisfied with his life except that he had yearned for years, without success, to have a son. After the birth of his third daughter, he became so enraged with his wife that he threatened to give all of their daughters away. She had to kneel on the floor and beg him to hang on to their children. “Give me one more chance,” she sobbed. “I promise I’ll make you a son next year.” True to her word, Sen was born a year later. Relieved, the rich man threw a month-long feast for all of his neighbors. He slaughtered cows, pigs, chickens and goats, and everyone drank the best rice and snake wines from sunset to sunrise for an entire month. The rich man grinned at his son’s tapered sprout the size of a tabasco and rubbed his nose affectionately against his wife’s face. Sen was breast-fed by his adoring mother until he was one, then he sucked on his grandmother’s dry titties until he was six, then he nibbled on one pacifier after another until he finally went to school at nine—his father couldn’t bear to let him out of the house any earlier. It took him three years to complete the first grade. If it rained or was too hot outside, Sen was kept at home. When he did go to school, he was always carried on the back of one of his three sisters. This arrangement lasted until he was fifteen and too chubby to be loaded onto anyone’s back. Until ten, he was always bathed by his mother. Until twelve, his sisters had to spoon-feed him at mealtimes.
7 MOUSE CHILD
In late 1970 Kim Lan finally conceived. Hoang Long seemed delighted by the news, but she was apprehensive. All day long she stood sideways in front of the mirror, frowning and rubbing her belly. To help her out with household chores and the operation of her café, she hired a domestic servant, a dark girl from Cu Chi.
The war had displaced millions of people, forcing countless girls from the countryside to seek work in the city, but jobs were scarce. The Americans were withdrawing and most bars—the Golden Cock, Pink Pussycat, Magic Finger Lounge, Buffalo Tom, Bar Bar, etc.—had to shut down. James Brown ceased to holler, grunt and plead from the soulful joints of Khanh Hoi. No more roiling bass lines and gaggles of charming hostesses to offer full privileges nightly to the foreign-born, irrespective of age, weight, physical appearance, interpersonal skills or social class. No kidding! Sorry about that! Even the Royal on Nguyen Hue Street, open since 1962, the first eatery in Saigon to serve cheeseburgers with real buns instead of sliced bread, went under. Spanky, Cowboy, Slim, Pimp, Gladly, Killer, the Weasel were going back to their sweethearts and Chevies, leaving behind sons and daughters and half-empty glasses of Saigon Tea on the table. No more of the sweet-voiced, omniscient, if occasionally ungrammatical, Hanoi Hannah—“How are you, GI Joe?”—to needle them about race riots and cheating girlfriends back home, or encourage grunts to frag blowhard officers. Many bar girls had to go back to the rice paddies or open small shops selling soft drinks and trinkets. Some shaved their heads, lit incense, chanting namyo or “Ave Maria.” Some, with their very own Spankies and Weasels, even moved to America.
The locals never quite got the hang of sitting on high stools to drink liquor while contemplating their groggy faces in the mirror, a TV droning in the background. Perched on a bar stool, your feet removed from the ground and your head closer to the sky, you felt less a part of this earth. Hardly comfortable on chairs, much less bar stools, they preferred to squat on their haunches, like a woman piddling alfresco. That was another reason the bars had to shut down.
Meanwhile, Kim Lan continued to stand in front of the mirror, frowning and rubbing her belly. Visiting neighbors reminded her to look at the beautiful faces on calendars, so her baby would be just as beautiful. Don’t cut cloth with scissors, they warned, or your child will have a harelip. Don’t use uneven chopsticks, or the baby’s legs will be uneven. At the sight of the deformed and the handicapped, they advised her to turn her gaze away. She was told never to squat inside a door frame, lest she have a difficult childbirth, requiring forceps, resulting in a pointy-headed baby. Don’t eat too much, they also told her, or the baby will be too big, and hard to get out. She could barely eat anyway. At four months, she stayed in bed all day. Even in hundred-degree heat, she’d be under a mound of blankets, in complete darkness, shivering. She could not stomach anything the servant placed in front of her.
