Mãn Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Éditions Libre Expression

  English Translation Copyright @ 2014 Sheila Fischman

  Published by arrangement Group Librex, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in United Kingdom by The Clerkenwell Press. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Thúy, Kim

  [Mãn. English]

  Mãn / Kim Thúy; translated by Sheila Fischman.

  Translation of French book with same title.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81379-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81381-7

  1. Thúy, Kim—Fiction. I. Fischman, Sheila, translator II. Title. III. Title: Mãn. English

  PS8639.H89M3613 2014 C843′.6 C2014-900580-6

  Cover design by CS Richardson

  Cover image: © Dan Goldberg / Photographer’s Choice / Getty Images

  Interior image: © Jiri Hera / Shutterstock.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  Permissions

  About the Author

  mẹ

  mothers

  MAMAN AND I DON’T look like one another. She is short, I am tall. Her complexion is dark, my skin is like a French doll’s. She has a hole in her calf and I have a hole in my heart.

  My first mother, the one who conceived me and gave birth to me, had a hole in her head. She was a young adult or maybe still a little girl, for no Vietnamese woman would have dared carry a child unless she had a ring on her finger.

  My second mother, the one who plucked me out of a vegetable garden among the okra, had a hole in her faith. She no longer believed in people, especially when they talked. And so she retired to a straw hut, far from the powerful arms of the Mekong, to recite prayers in Sanskrit.

  My third mother, the one who watched me attempt my first steps, became Maman, my Maman. That morning, she wanted to open her arms again. And so she opened the shutters in her bedroom, which until that day had always been closed. In the distance, in the warm light, she saw me, and I became her daughter. She gave me a second birth by bringing me up in a big city, an anonymous elsewhere, behind a schoolyard, surrounded by children who envied me for having a mother who taught school and sold iced bananas.

  dừa

  coconut

  VERY EARLY EVERY MORNING, before classes started, we went grocery shopping. We started with the woman who sold ripe coconuts, rich in flesh and poor in juice. The lady grated the first half-coconut with the cap of a soft drink bottle nailed to the end of a flat stick. Long strips fell in a decorative frieze, like ribbons, on the banana leaf spread out on the stall. The merchant talked non-stop and kept asking Maman the same question: “What do you feed that child to give her such red lips?” To avoid that question, I got in the habit of pressing my lips together, but I was so fascinated by how quickly she grated the second half that I always watched her with my mouth partly open. She set her foot on a long black metal spatula that had part of its handle sitting on a small wooden bench. Without looking at the pointed teeth at the rounded end of the spatula, she crumbled the nut at the speed of a machine.

  The fall of the crumbs through the hole in the spatula must just resemble the flight of snowflakes in Santa Claus country, Maman always said, which was actually something her own mother would say. She spoke her mother’s words to hear her voice again. And whenever she saw boys playing soccer with an empty tin can, she couldn’t help but whisper londi, in her mother’s voice.

  thứ 2

  lundi

  thứ 3

  mardi

  thứ 4

  mercredi

  thứ 5

  jeudi

  thứ 6

  vendredi

  thứ 7

  samedi

  chủ nhật

  dimanche

  THAT WAS MY FIRST word of French: londi. In Vietnamese, lon means “tin can” and đi, “to go away.” In French, the two sounds together create lundi in the ear of a Vietnamese woman. Following her own mother’s example, she taught me the French word by asking me to point to the tin can then kick it, saying lon đi for lundi. So that second day of the week is the most beautiful of all for Maman because her mother died before teaching her how to pronounce the other days. Only lundi was associated with a clear, unforgettable image. The other six days were absent from any reference, therefore all alike. That’s why my mother often confused mardi with jeudi and sometimes reversed samedi and mercredi.

  ớt hiểm

  vicious peppers

  BEFORE HER MOTHER DIED, though, she’d had time to learn how to extract the milk from a coconut by squeezing chunks of crumbled flesh saturated with hot water. When mothers taught their daughters how to cook, they spoke in hushed tones, whispering so that neighbours couldn’t steal recipes and possibly seduce their husbands with the same dishes. Culinary traditions are passed on secretly, like magic tricks between master and apprentice, one movement at a time, following the rhythms of each day. In the natural order, then, girls learned to measure the amount of water for cooking rice with the first joint of the index finger, to cut “vicious peppers” (ớt hiểm) with the point of the knife to transform them into harmless flowers, to peel mangoes from base to stem so they won’t go against the direction of the fibres …

  chuối

  banana

  THAT WAS HOW I LEARNED from my mother that of the dozens of kinds of bananas sold at the market, only the chuối xiêm could be flattened without being crushed and frozen without turning black. When I first came to Montreal, I prepared it as a treat for my husband, who hadn’t eaten it for twenty years. I wanted him to taste once again the typical marriage of peanuts and coconut, two ingredients that in south Vietnam are served as much at dessert as at breakfast. I hoped to be able to serve and be a companion to my husband without disturbing anything, a little like flavours that are hardly noticed because they are ever-present.

  chồng

  husband

  MAMAN ENTRUSTED ME TO this man out of motherly love, just as the nun, my second mother, had given me to her, thinking about my future. Because Maman was preparing for her death, knowing that one day she would no longer be around, she sought a husband for me who would have the qualities of a father. One of her friends, acting as matchmaker, brought him to visit us one afternoon. Maman asked me to serve the tea, that was all. I did not look at the face of the man even when I set the cup in front of him. My gaze wasn’t required, it was only his that mattered.

  thuyền nhân

  boat people

  HE HAD COME FROM FAR AWAY and didn’t have much time. Several families were waiting to introduce him to their daughters. He was from Saigon but had left Vietnam at twenty, as one of the boat people. He had spent several years in a refugee camp in Thailand before coming to Montreal, where he’d found work but not exactly a home. He was one of those who had lived too long in Vietnam to become Canadian. And conversely, who have lived too long in Canada to be Vietnamese again.

  văn hóa

  culture

  WHEN HE GOT UP from our table, his steps to the door were uncertain, like
those of a man lost between two worlds. He no longer knew if he was supposed to cross the threshold before or after a woman. He no longer knew if his words should be those of the matchmaker or his own. His flubs when he spoke to Maman stunned us all. He called her, at random, Big Sister (Chị), Aunt (Cô) and Great-Aunt (Bác). No one held it against him that he came from elsewhere, from a place where personal pronouns exist so that they can remain impersonal. In the absence of those pronouns, the Vietnamese language imposes a relationship from the very first contact: the younger of the two interlocutors must respect and obey the elder, and conversely, the elder must give advice and protection to the younger. If someone were to listen to a conversation between them, he would be able to guess that, for example, the younger one is the nephew of one of his mother’s older brothers. Similarly, if the conversation were taking place between two people with no family ties, it would be possible as well to determine whether the elder is younger than the parents of the other. In the case of my future husband, he might have partially expressed his interest in me if he’d called Maman Bác, because Great-Aunt would have elevated Maman to the rank of his parents and would have implied her position of mother-in-law. But uncertainty had mixed him up.

  quạt máy

  fan

  TO OUR AMAZEMENT, he came back the following day with offerings: a fan, a box of maple cookies and a bottle of shampoo. This time, I was obliged to sit between Maman and the matchmaker, across from the man and his parents, who were making a display on the table of photos that showed him at the wheel of his car, standing in front of some tulips, and in his restaurant holding two big bowls with his thumb nearly touching the scalding broth. Lots of photos of him, always alone.

  hoa phượng

  poinciana

  MAMAN AGREED TO A third visit two days later. He asked for some time alone with me. In Vietnam, cafés with their chairs facing the street, like in France, were intended for men. Girls without makeup or false eyelashes didn’t drink coffee, at least not in public. We could have had smoothies with soursop, sapodilla or papaya at the place next door, but that patch of garden with its blue plastic stools seemed reserved for the veiled smiles of schoolgirls and the timid touches of young lovers’ hands. Whereas we were merely future spouses. Of the whole neighbourhood, all that was left to us was the pink granite bench in front of the row of apartments for the teachers, including ours, in the schoolyard, under the poinciana tree heavy with flowers but with branches as delicate and graceful as a ballerina’s arms. Bright red petals covered the whole bench until he cleared part of it so he could sit down. I remained standing to look at him and regretted that he couldn’t see himself surrounded by all those flowers. At that precise moment, I knew that I would always remain standing, that he would never think of making room for me beside him because that was the sort of man he was, alone and lonely.

  con sóc

  squirrel

  I OFFERED HIM THE glass of lemonade with salt lime that my mother had prepared for him. He reminded me of those brown limes marinated in salt, warmed in the sun and altered completely by time, for his eyes were not old but aged, almost blurred, faded.

  “Have you ever seen a squirrel?”

  “Just in books.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  Silence.

  “I’ll send you the papers.”

  Silence.

  “We’ll have children.”

  “Yes.”

  He gave me his address and phone number on a sheet of paper folded in two. He left, walking slowly and unobtrusively like the soldier who had given Maman this poem, also written on a page folded in two:

  Anh tặng em

  Cuộc đời anh không sống

  Giấc mơ anh chỉ mơ

  Một tâm hồn để trống

  Những đêm trắng mong chờ

  Anh tặng em

  Bài thơ anh không viết

  Nỗi đau anh đi tìm

  Màu mây anh chưa biết

  Tha thiết của lặng im

  I offer you

  The life I have not lived

  The dream I can but dream

  A soul I’ve left empty

  During sleepless nights

  As I go to you I hold as an offering

  The poem I have not written

  The ache towards which I strain

  The colour of the cloud I haven’t known

  The longings of silence.

  áo dài

  tunic

  HIS NAME WAS PHƯƠNG. Maman had known him since he’d started playing a version of pétanque, bowling with sandals instead of steel balls. She noticed him because he always missed his shot when she passed by him on the way home from school. His teammates said that Maman brought him bad luck. As for him, he waited for his chance every day at the same time, even if he did not yet know what he was waiting for. He was able to give a precise name to that expectation only when he saw her arrive for the first time in a white áo dài, the uniform of her new school, whose name was embroidered in blue on a label sewn between her shoulder and her left breast. In the distance, the panels of her tunic blowing in the wind transformed her into a butterfly in gentle flight, destination unknown. From that precise moment, he never missed a single outing of Maman’s class and he followed her, keeping his distance, to her home.

  guốc

  wooden sandals with heels

  HE SPOKE TO HER for the first time long afterwards, when the heel of Maman’s shoe broke, as her half-brothers and half-sisters had predicted would happen. He rushed to her spontaneously to offer her his own sandals, then took off with the broken-heeled shoe. He was surprised to observe saw marks in the wood when he tried to repair it in the workshop of a cousin who made coffins. The next day, he was waiting for her in front of the bougainvillea that gave a softening effect to the strict metal of the front door of the judge’s house. As soon as he saw Maman’s foot on the first paving stone of the path, he bent down to place the shoes in the right direction on the threshold. To avoid compromising Maman’s reputation, he stepped away a few metres. She slipped them on and then, in turn, placed in her own footprints Phương’s sandals, the ones that had let her continue home without getting dirty, without stopping, without crying.

  mưa

  rain

  EVER SINCE PHƯƠNG’S SHADOW had been following hers, she’d stopped crying under her umbrella, which had been pierced with a needle and looked like a sieve, because Phương’s was always there to protect her before the first drop fell and even before Maman had caught sight of the first grey cloud. And so she carried two umbrellas, one beneath the other, and Phương, bare-headed, walked three paces behind her. He had never wanted to take shelter under the same one because with the two of them, the rain could have dulled the lustre of Maman’s perfectly smooth black hair.

  From outside the garden planted with longan, papaya and jackfruit trees, it was impossible to hear Maman’s silence. No one aside from the servants could have imagined that her half-brothers and half-sisters made a game of breaking every other tooth in her comb and cutting locks of her hair while she slept. Maman was able to convince herself of the innocence of their acts, or the fact that the acts flowed from their very innocence. She remained silent to preserve that innocence as well as her father’s. She did not want her father to see his own children tear one another to pieces, for already he was both witness and judge of the ripping apart of his country, its culture, its people.

  Mẹ Ghẻ

  cold mother

  HER FATHER WOULD HAVE preferred not to have children with a second wife after the sudden death of the first, for that new spouse would inevitably become a Mẹ Ghẻ—a “cold mother.” However, he did not yet have a son who would ensure the continuity of his own father’s family name and that of all the ancestors who watched over him and carried him from the top of their altar. And so that cold mother played her role as spouse by giving him sons, and the role of parent in the manner of the stepmothers of
Snow White, Cinderella and all the other orphaned princesses.

  It should be said that ghẻ also means “mange.” And so, to live up to the ugly title “mangy mother” that had been inflicted on her, she showed her children how to hate Maman and her big sisters, how to draw the line between the first and second litter, how to differentiate oneself from those other girls even though they all had the same nose. I wonder if that mangy mother would have been less bitter had she been called stepmother. Would she have been less afraid of the beauty of Maman’s big sisters? Would she have been less eager to marry them off?

  sạn

  gravel

  BEING YOUNGER, Maman awaited her turn to be given in marriage separating the stone and gravel fragments from the rice like prayer beads. Her cold mother forbade the cooks to help her so she would learn obedience and discipline. And so what she learned above all was how to become flexible, imperceptible, invisible even. When her mother died, people told her that she’d gone because she had finished paying her debts on earth. So then Maman discarded stones as if they were part of her debt, a weight that prevented her from taking flight. She got rid of them in the hope of arriving at the state of weightlessness. She was thrilled to see her jar fill up with those impurities meal after meal, day after day. She buried the jar under the mango tree next to the cookie tin that held Une vie, by Guy de Maupassant, a book from her mother’s library that she’d been able to save. Her cold mother needed space on the shelf for the wind to circulate around the hammock. She may have been right, because the length of cloth that hung from the ceiling functioned as a fan, moving the air just above her husband’s sleeping body.