Vi

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Éditions Libre Expression

  English Translation Copyright © 2018 Sheila Fischman

  Published by arrangement with Groupe Librex, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Thúy, Kim

  [Vi. English]

  Vi / Kim Thúy; [translated by] Sheila Fischman.

  Translation of: Vi.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735272798

  eBook ISBN 9780735272811

  I. Fischman, Sheila, translator II. Title. III. Title: Vi. English.

  PS8639.H89V513 2018 C843’.6 C2017-905121-0

  Book design by CS Richardson

  Cover image © Paul Bucknall / Arcangel Images

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Vi

  About the Authors

  MEKONG CỬU LONG

  ~

  nine dragons

  I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD when our house was plunged into silence.

  Under the fan fixed to the ivory wall of the dining room, a large bright-red sheet of rigid cardboard held a block of three hundred and sixty-five sheets of paper. On each was marked the month, the day of the week, and two dates: one according to the solar calendar, the other according to the lunar calendar. As soon as I was able to climb onto a chair, the task of tearing off a page was reserved for me when I woke up. I was the guardian of time. That privilege was taken away from me when my older brothers, Long and Lộc, turned seventeen. Beginning on that birthday, which we didn’t celebrate, my mother cried every morning in front of the calendar. It seemed to me that she was being torn apart each time she ripped off that day’s page. The tick-tock of the clock that usually put us to sleep at afternoon nap time suddenly sounded like a bomb waiting to explode.

  I was the baby of the family, the only sister of my three big brothers, the one everyone protected like precious bottles of perfume behind glassed-in doors. Even though my young age meant I was somewhat sheltered from my family’s concerns, I knew that the two older boys would have to leave for the battlefield on the day they turned eighteen. Whether they were sent to Cambodia to fight Pol Pot or to the frontier with China, both destinations reserved for them the same fate, the same death.

  HANOI HÀNỘI

  ~

  inner river

  MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER had graduated from the Faculty of Law at the Université de Hanoi, where he was identified as “indigenous.” France took charge of educating its subjects but did not accord the same value to diplomas awarded in its colonies. It may have been right to do so because the realities of life in Indochina had nothing in common with those of France. On the other hand, course requirements and exam questions were the same. My grandfather often told us that after the written examinations came a series of orals that led to the baccalaureate. For the French course, he’d had to translate in front of his teachers a Vietnamese poem into French and another in the opposite direction. Mathematics problems also had to be solved orally. The final test was to contend with the hostility of those who would decide on his future while still keeping his composure.

  The teachers’ intransigence didn’t surprise the students because, in the social hierarchy, intellectuals occupied the top of the pyramid. They sat there as wise men and would be addressed as “Professeur” by their students all their lives. It was unthinkable to question what they said because they possessed the universal truth. That is why my grandfather had never protested when his teachers gave him a French name. From lack of knowledge or as an act of resistance, his parents had not done so. In his classes, then, from year to year, from one professor to another, he would acquire a new name. Henri Lê Văn An. Philippe Lê Văn An. Pascal Lê Văn An…Of all these names, he ended up retaining Antoine and transformed Lê Văn An into a family name.

  SAIGON SÀI GÒN

  ~

  city of the forest, cotton tree

  BACK IN SAIGON, diploma in hand, my paternal grandfather became a respected judge and a fabulously wealthy landowner. He expressed his pride at having created at the same time an empire and an enviable reputation by giving his own name to each of his children: Thérèse Lê Văn An. Jeanne Lê Văn An. Marie Lê Văn An…and my father, Jean Lê Văn An. In contrast to me, my father was the only boy in a family of six girls. Like me, my father arrived last, just as everyone had stopped hoping for a standard-bearer. His birth transformed the life of my grandmother who, until then, had suffered every day from mean-spirited remarks about her inability to beget an heir. She had been torn between her own desire to be her husband’s only wife and his duty to choose a second spouse. Luckily for her, her husband was one of those who had adopted the French practice of monogamy. Or perhaps he was quite simply in love with my grandmother, a woman known throughout Cochin-China for her graceful beauty and her delight in the pleasures of the senses.

  CÁI BÈ

  ~

  sheaf, bunch of stems

  MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER first met my grandfather very early one morning at the floating market in Cái Bè, a district on one of the arms of the Mekong that was half land, half water. Every day since 1732, merchants had been bringing their crops of fruits and vegetables to that part of the delta to sell to wholesalers. From far away the colour of the wood, mingled with the muddy brown of the water, gives the impression that melons, pineapples, pomelos, cabbages, gourds are floating independently of the men who have been waiting on the wharf since dawn to snap them up at the first opportunity. To this day, they transfer the fruits and vegetables by hand, as if these crops were entrusted to them, not sold. My grandmother was standing on the deck of the ferry, hypnotized by these repetitive and synchronized movements, when my grandfather noticed her. He was at first dazzled by the sun, then astounded by the young girl with her generous curves accented by the folds of the Vietnamese dress that tolerates no superfluous movement and, above all, no indelicacy of intention. Snap fasteners down the right side keep the dress closed but never really fasten it. As a result, a single broad or abrupt movement causes the tunic to open all the way. For this reason, schoolgirls have to wear a camisole underneath to avoid accidental indecency. On the other hand, nothing can prevent the two long panels of the dress from replying to the breath of the wind and capturing hearts that find it hard to resist the power of beauty.

  My grandfather fell into that trap. Blinded by the gentle, intermittent movement of the wings of the dress, he declared to his colleague that he would not leave Cái Bè without that woman. He first had to humiliate another young girl who’d been promised to him and cause offence to the elders in his family before he could touch the hands of my grandmother. Some believed that he was in love with her long-lashed almond eyes, others, with her fleshy lips, while still others were convinced that he’d been seduced by her full hips. No one had noticed the slender fingers holding a notebook against her bosom except my grandfather, who went on describing them for decades. He continued to evoke them long after age had transformed those smooth, tapering fingers into a fabulous myth or, at the very most, a lover
s’ tale.

  BIÊN HÒA

  BIÊN HÒA’S INDIGENOUS ARTS SCHOOL was at the height of its renown when my grandparents visited it to buy the seventh piece of ceramic for their seventh child; they were hesitating between the blue-flecked copper and the celadon glaze when my grandmother’s waters broke. After pushing a few times, she gave birth to my father. Miraculously, my grandfather, two weeks earlier than predicted, was presented with a boy. His only boy.

  My father was carried in my grandmother’s fairy-like hands. And also in the hands of his six older sisters. And in those of the twenty-six nurses, cooks, maids, not counting those of the six hundred women who received adoringly in their open arms his well-formed face, his broad shoulders, his athlete’s legs, and his seductive smile.

  He could have studied sciences or the law like his sisters. But the affection of some and the love of others drew him away from his books and in so doing atrophied the gland that stimulates desire. How to desire when all is fulfilled in advance? Before he had even opened his eyes, the nipple of a lukewarm bottle of milk would be brushing his lips—up to the age of five or six. No one dared wake him for school, because his mother forbade anyone to interrupt his dreams. His nurse escorted him to his school desk, where she learned to read at the same time as he did. During his piano lessons, the maids fought over who could cool the back of his neck and freshen the ambient air with the sandalwood fan. He charmed his teacher simply by accompanying her warm-up notes with his voice. The more years passed, the larger the assembly in front of his house to hear the melodies he invented on the spot, without having the least aspiration to immortalize the slightest thing. The effort wearied him, as did the hands that kept dabbing at the drops of sweat on his nose. Still, he dared not refuse any of those attentions because, for him, to receive meant to give of oneself.

  And so my father grew up in rapture, and also in a weightless void. He did not count his time in hours, but rather in the number of moves in a game of Chinese checkers, or the number of punishments his mother inflicted on the maids who let drop a bowl or a broom during his naps, or the number of love letters slipped anonymously into the letter box.

  The fruits of the Lê Văn An empire would have easily permitted him to live on the margins of society. Fortunately, life loves to constantly alter the order of things, thus giving everyone the opportunity to follow its progress, to live within it. My father was barely twenty when agrarian reform divided in two the revenue and properties of the Lê Văn An empire. For the first time, farm workers were able to own the fields they ploughed. Just as these new policies were being implemented, my grandfather suffered a heart attack that diminished him by half. Without those shocks, my father would probably never have married my mother.

  DA LAT ĐÀ LẠT

  ~

  in Latin dat

  aliis laetitiam

  aliis temperiem

  THE GIRLS OF ĐÀ LẠT were known for their pale complexions and their pink cheeks. Some believe that the high, cool plateaus safeguard their radiance, while others attribute the softness of their gestures to the mist that covers those valleys. My mother was an exception to this rule. Very quickly, very early, she accepted the fact that the boys would never say, “You are my springtime,” even though her first name, Xuân, meant “spring,” and she lived in a place called “the city of eternal spring.” My mother had not inherited my grandmother’s fine, smooth skin. Rather, she bore her father’s Khmer genes, evident in her sturdy face, to which was added the ravages of acne throughout her adolescence. In order to turn away the eyes of others and to stitch the lips of sour mouths, she chose to become a woman who was fierce, armed with a will of iron and a hard, masculine vocabulary. She had come first in her class, from kindergarten right up to her final year at school. Without waiting to begin her studies in management, at a very young age she took over the reins of the family orchid farm, diversifying and reorganizing the production and transforming it into a business that grew exponentially.

  She asked her father, a highly placed bureaucrat, if she could make improvements to the villa they rented out to vacationers. Very soon, she persuaded him to buy several other villas in order to meet the high demand: there were many people who sought a destination that reminded them of Europe, far from the daily and often stifling reality of tropical temperatures and conflicted relations between the dominant and the dominated. It was said that Đà Lạt, as its name indicated, had the power to provide pleasure for some and cool air for others.

  My mother was fifteen years old when my father rented the Đà Lạt villa for the first time. My father didn’t notice her because, when he passed by, she had to lower her eyes in order not to betray herself. She had spied on him from a distance during this initial visit of Judge Lê Văn An’s family. The following year, and from then on, she insisted on taking part in meal preparation, overseeing every detail, from the carrots delicately carved into flowers and added to sauces, to the pieces of watermelon from which the seeds had been removed one by one with a toothpick so as not to disturb the flesh.

  In the morning, the coffee had to be prepared from civet droppings, to which was attributed its caramelized taste, free of bitterness. My mother brought the morning coffee herself to my father on the terrace, hoping to see him applying brilliantine to his comb in order to shape his ebony hair, in the manner of Clark Gable. She had to catch her breath every time she saw him twist the comb, using the handle’s pointed end to let fall a small S-shaped lock onto his brow. Even if she was standing just a few steps away, waiting for the coffee to seep, drop by drop, through the filter posed directly on one of the family’s four rare Baccarat glasses, she remained invisible to his eyes. She prolonged the pleasure of being in his company by squeezing the filter’s base, thus slowing the hot water’s progress through the layer of tightly packed coffee. When it came to the last drops, she passed the back of the spoon under the filter, an act that halted the flow. Like all Vietnamese, my father took his coffee sweetened with condensed milk, except for the first sip, which he preferred black, pure. It was after this first sip that he at last spoke to my mother.

  BUÔN MÊ THUỘT

  ASTOUNDED BY THE UNUSUAL, velvety taste of the coffee, he turned his eyes in my mother’s direction. She revealed to him the secret, showing him a small, misshapen ball dotted with seeds, gathered nearby from the plantations at Buôn Mê Thuột. Those balls came from wild civets that excreted the seeds whole after having eaten and digested ripe coffee cherries. And since the coolies did not have the right to avail themselves of the fruit they gathered for the owners, they had processed that excrement, which revealed itself to be more delicate, and above all rarer, than the regular harvest. My father became an instant convert. My mother volunteered to be his provider, and the one who schooled him in the aromas added piecemeal during the roasting, including the precious butter imported from France. Every two weeks, she carefully wrapped up a bag of coffee that she or an employee placed directly in my father’s hands. She continued to observe this ritual during the rainy season, during the demonstrations in the Saigon streets, between the arrival of the Soviets in the North and the deployment of American soldiers in the South.

  When the Lê Văn An family came to Đà Lạt, my mother continued to attend to the needs of my father, from coffee at dawn to the mosquito netting tucked in between the mattress and the bed. After my paternal grandfather’s heart attack, my mother’s parents invited him and his family to come more often, because the air of Đà Lạt was recognized for its healing powers. Little by little, one of the villas became the residence of my father’s family, even if they didn’t have the means to pay for such a prolonged stay. My mother was delighted to see my father leaving his footprints on the earthen paths in the rose garden, and to hear his voice resonate among the pines at night.

  The reforms and political changes had seriously impoverished the Lê Văn An family. Despite his carefree manner, my father was concerned about the erosion of his comfort. The deafening echo of
the luxurious shell being drained from inside presented him with the image of a handsome prince with no kingdom. The fear of becoming a man in decline prompted him to take hold of my mother’s hand in full flight. A single word escaped from his mouth: “Xuân.” A single word from my father was enough to elicit an eternal vow from my mother: “Yes, I’ll take care of everything.”

  GRAND LAC HỒ XUN HƯƠNG

  ~

  lake of the scent of spring

  MY PARENTS’ MARRIAGE was the event of the season at Ðà Lạt. In order to satisfy the curiosity of the employees and residents of the town, my parents paraded in a convertible around Lake Hồ Xuân Hương before arriving at the reception, where the region’s personages and dignitaries awaited them, and where all the women laid bets on my mother’s unhappy future. On my father’s arm, accompanied by her parents and her parents-in-law, my mother welcomed the guests at every table. My father and my two grandfathers thanked each group for their good wishes, toasting and emptying their glasses along with the table’s spokesman. While the men cheated by filling their glasses with tea instead of whisky so they could complete their tour without falling down, my mother took pleasure in staring down the women who had openly called her a “monkey,” “savage,” and “transvestite” since her birth. To the ends of their lives, they continued to be mystified by my father’s decision. My mother could make light of those insults, because from now on she would walk wrapped in the aura of my father’s beauty.

  To be my father’s wife was to erase her flattened nostrils, her drooping eyelids, her square chin. She presented herself to people as Madame Lê Văn An, and demanded to be addressed as such by her employees, because each time this name was uttered, she heard my father whispering that her hair cascaded like the water of the Prenn Falls, that her pupils were as round and bright as two longan pits, and, above all, that no other woman understood him better than she did. From the first year of their marriage, she created a throne that allowed my father to be the monarch of his kingdom, by buying a warehouse and a villa in Saigon. He became the master of this depot where merchants and buyers came to submit their orders to a staff hired by my mother and officially overseen by my father. My mother advised their employees that he had to attend a number of social functions in the evening. Therefore it was strictly forbidden to disturb him in the morning, at noon, during his siestas, or when he was reflecting. All questions were to be addressed to her first, while all the decisions taken by my father were to be given priority in their execution.