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  CHOLON CHỢ LỚN

  ~

  big market

  SHE ARRIVED AT THE OFFICE at four thirty in the morning, after the wholesalers’ market, to receive the first sales report from her employees. At seven o’clock she was back at the house, a few streets away. Those two properties would not have been accessible to her had she not mentioned her Chinese ancestors. Chợ Lớn was, and still is, the preserve of the Chinese community, known for its solidarity and its commercial might. Gontran de Poncins, a French viscount who was an author, adventurer, and journalist, had chosen to live there in 1955, in order to write a study of Chinese culture. Monsieur de Poncins suspected that the ancestral customs were better preserved in the colonies than in the mother country, or, at the very least, for a longer period. My grandfather Lê Văn An had long conversations on that subject with Monsieur de Poncins, and also concerning Monsieur Yvon Petra, born in Chợ Lớn, and who, in 1946, became the last French winner of Wimbledon, a distinction that stands to this day. That tennis player was also the last to wear long pants on the court. My grandfather was convinced that he had respected this sartorial tradition to the end in the manner of the children of Chợ Lớn, who not only adhered to millenary customs and mores but spoke Vietnamese with a Chinese accent, even if they had never set foot in China.

  My father never liked Chợ Lớn. He preferred downtown Saigon with its French cafés and American bars. Above all, he liked to drink beer on the Hôtel Continental terrace, where the foreign journalists spent their days analyzing troop movements and the latest popular songs. As often as he could, he reserved the table where Graham Greene, a war correspondent at the beginning of the 1950s, liked to station himself to keep an eye on the city and to draw inspiration from neighbouring tables for the characters in his novel The Quiet American.

  HAI BÀ TRƯNG

  ~

  the two Trưng sisters

  AT THE HEIGHT OF THE LÊ VĂN AN EMPIRE, my grandfather collected dwellings situated on the Hai Bà Trưng Street of different towns through which he passed. He wanted to remind my aunts that they should be independent of mind and above all combative, following the example of the two Trưng sisters, who had driven back the Chinese army and governed sixty-five towns and villages for three years, before committing suicide when they lost power. In honour of those two heroines who remained unrivalled for two thousand years, my grandfather offered the use of those houses to nieces, cousins, friends, and scholarship holders during their studies. Over the years, the beneficiaries transformed those temporary lodgings into permanent residences when they started their families.

  My father took possession of the house on Hai Bà Trưng Street in Saigon, where he hosted his mistresses and friends. They got together for games of Ping-Pong or poker with their paramour of the day, or for “forbidden games,” as he liked to call them, referring to the soundtrack of the famous French film and its melody that was learned by all the Vietnamese youths who tried to coax songs from their guitars. Once married, he continued to use this space for the same purposes, as did many of the men in his circle. Out of discretion and in the interests of her own survival, my mother never set foot there. She just reminded the servant to always have ready a dish of fresh fruit, to prepare dried shrimp mixed with marinated wild garlic cloves to accompany the rice wine, and to bring along baguettes and pâté to be consumed along with the wine.

  This servant was and still is my father’s closest friend. They were born three months apart. His mother had been hired as my father’s wet nurse by my maternal grandmother, who didn’t know that the young woman had left her village to continue her pregnancy to term. The two boys became brothers. They played marbles together, engaged in cricket battles and sword fights. They raised fighting fish, one per jar, keeping each one hidden from the other with pieces of cardboard to save their energies for battle. Sometimes they allowed themselves to lift the cardboard and admire the deployment of their fins. The blue one fanned its tail into a half moon; the white one swept the water with its skirts as if its long wedding dress were as light as air; the orange one was less spectacular, but very precious because it never gave up; as much as the orange attacked, so the yellow was master of the art of evading its adversary and waiting patiently for the opportune moment to strike. The two boys spent hours discussing the personalities of their fish, and feeding them mosquito larvae. Their passion for the fish from the stagnant water of the rice paddies never waned. Their collection grew as soon as they were able to raise females as well, and knew how to pair them with a male during their fertile periods. They watched closely as the males made their nests of bubbles in preparation for the births and chased off the females as soon as they’d laid their eggs. The boys then transferred them to another jar to prevent the females from devouring their children. They raised their fish together, like a family that belonged exclusively to them. They had their favourites, but were deeply saddened when any one of them died.

  THỦ ÐỨC

  MY FATHER AND HIS SERVANT were brothers who had different family names and different parents, and who went to different schools. One attended the neighbourhood school with its beaten earth floor while the other carried his notebooks in a bag made of elephant hide. Everyone knew my father’s school, which was named for Pétrus Ky, an intellectual who had taught and popularized the Vietnamese language written with the Roman alphabet instead of Chinese characters. Even though Vietnamese is now written by sound, most of the words still carry the trace of the original images from ideograms.

  My first name, Bảo Vi, showed my parents’ determination to “protect the smallest one.” In a literal translation, I am “Tiny precious microscopic.” As is often the case in Vietnam, I did not match the image of my own name. Girls called “Blanche” (Bạch) or “Snow” (Tuyết) will have very dark skin, and boys called “Powerful” (Hùng) or “Strong” (Mạnh) will be afraid of challenges. As for me, I kept on growing, far surpassing the average and at the same time projecting myself outside the norm. Teachers put me in the back row so they would have a better overall view of the classroom. In that way they could detect the slightest out-of-place movement and the guilty student would end up instantly at the board, facing his sixty classmates, hand open, waiting for the blow of the wooden ruler on his knuckles or palm. Afterwards, it was extremely difficult for the pupil to hold a pen, dip it into the ink bottle, and write without trembling. In spite of his efforts and the pink blotter held in the left hand to follow the movements of the pen and soak up excess ink, he was rarely able to follow the two-millimetre horizontal lines in the ruled Séyès notebooks without going over the edge or staining the paper. Besides having a swollen hand, he would lose points for sloppy work. I was definitely a model student compared with the scatterbrains relegated to the back of the classroom. Or at least the most delicate, because I tried as best I could to be a “Vi,” a microscopic girl, invisible.

  If my father had been as invisible as me at the end of the war, he would not have been arrested and sent to a re-education camp in the region of Thủ Ðức, where he shared with the ten comrades in his hut his daily ration of ten peanuts. Because my father had been born with the destiny of princes, he was freed after two months. His servant brother had been able to save him by demonstrating to the authorities that my father had supported him financially in his espionage work for the Communist resistance. He argued that my father had indirectly helped the North to win the war against the South, which had exonerated him from the status of bourgeois capitalist. Without the intervention of that enemy brother, he’d have stayed behind digging canals, clearing minefields, digging up the ground with the other prisoners who had lost all hope of learning when they would be set free. The only thought they allowed themselves was to hope that a grasshopper or a rat would happen by and become their evening meal, because any other reflection could be interpreted as a betrayal of Communist thought. The surgeon in the next hut, who had been drying a few tiny rice cakes in the sun, was accused of preparing for his e
scape instead of concentrating on his re-education. An accountant had been similarly sanctioned when he confided to the other prisoners that he could hear the sound of motorcycles driving along the north side of the prison. If my father had seen other men being summoned by the guards, never to come back to the camp, he might perhaps have chosen to flee Vietnam. Perhaps he would not have abandoned us to our race towards the unknown without him. Like my mother, he would perhaps have given priority to saving his sons from military service. Unfortunately, once again he withdrew into the cocoon of his bachelor apartment, isolated from the uncertainties of life.

  CATINAT

  WE LEFT VIETNAM with a close friend of my mother, Hà, and her parents.

  Hà is much younger than my mother. At the beginning of the 1970s in Saigon, she was the perfect modern woman in the American style, with her very short dresses that showed off the slanted, heart-shaped birthmark high up on her left thigh. I remember her irresistible platform shoes in the hallway of our house, which struck me as decadent, or at least gave me a new perspective on the world when I slipped them on. Her false eyelashes thick with mascara transformed her eyes into two spiky-haired rambutans. She was our Twiggy, with her apple-green and turquoise eyeshadow, two colours that clashed with her coppery skin. She was unlike most of the young girls, who avoided the sun in order to set themselves apart from the peasants in the rice fields, who had to roll their pants up to their knees and endure the violent bright light. Hà bared her skin at the swimming pool of the very exclusive Cercle Sportif, where she gave me swimming lessons. She preferred American freedom to the elegance of French culture, which gave her the courage to participate in the first Miss Vietnam competition, even though she was an English teacher.

  My mother did not approve of her choices, which went contrary to her status as a well-educated young woman from a good family. But she supported her by buying her the long dress and bathing suit that Hà would wear on stage. She had her practise walking in a straight line along the tiled floor, balancing a dictionary on her head, as she’d seen women do in films. My mother treated her as if she were her big sister, and shielded her from gossip. She allowed Hà to take me with her to the chic boutiques on rue Catinat, and to drink a lime soda with her foreign friends. Hà marched along this street with its grand hotels like a proud conqueror. The city belonged to her. I wondered whether my mother envied her this ease that came from the compliments raining down on her from her teachers and her American colleagues. The latter celebrated her beauty with gifts of chocolate bars, hair curlers, and Louis Armstrong records, whereas the Vietnamese looked on her dark complexion as “savage.” More than once, my grandparents asked my mother to halt my swimming lessons with Hà. I suspect that my mother disobeyed them and kept Hà close to us because she hoped I’d learn to be beautiful. Unfortunately, that time with Hà in Vietnam was too short—or my apprenticeship, too slow.

  VINH

  ~

  victorious

  IN 1954, THE SEVENTEENTH PARALLEL cut Vietnam in two. In 1975, April 30 drew a line dividing before from after, between the end of a war and what followed, between power and fear. Before, we heard Hà’s laughter as soon as she turned off her scooter’s motor. She laughed while playing hopscotch with the children in the alley, she teased the gardener for the irresistible transparency of his worn shirt, she fearlessly answered to the yapping of our guard dogs. After, Hà became the wife of a general from Vinh, a northern town razed by bombings but filled with wandering spirits, including those of his parents, whom he’d not been able to visit again before they became buried beneath the ruins. Without that general, all of Hà’s family would have been sent to the uninhabitable swampy lands called “new economic zones.”

  Becoming the wife of a general allowed Hà to continue teaching English, and not have to line up to buy the monthly ration of sugar, rice, and meat. No one dared to speak badly of those who had made the same choice as Hà. But the stares of others wounded her as much as the general’s slaps, to which she was resigned. She couldn’t spare her parents the noises betraying her submission, since they were just on the other side of a newly installed curtain. Rather than leap up in a rage, her parents kept silent. They played dead. They feared that Hà might suffer the same fate as their neighbour, who had put a bullet into her head after having succeeded in freeing her husband from a re-education camp in exchange for a liaison with a high-ranking officer from the North. This new partner had consented to the liberation and also to her husband’s and children’s flight by boat. After their departure, she pulled the trigger to achieve her own liberation.

  My mother treated this new Hà, in her dark clothes and no longer wearing makeup, with the same consideration as before. She awaited her with cotton batten and the bottle of lotion she used to treat her every wound. According to family lore, this long infusion of rice wine and medicinal herbs had healed a cousin’s neck that had been torn open by shrapnel from a bomb, prevented a neighbour’s burns from becoming infected after she had been doused with acid by a jealous husband, and could make bruises vanish even before your tears had dried.

  As much as Hà had proudly displayed her painted eyelids before her marriage to the general, so, from the start of her new relationship, she hid her black eyes under the wide brim of a hat. I had the impression that she was becoming smaller and smaller, not only because of her flat plastic slippers that scraped the ground, but also because of the absence of her boisterous laughter. She climbed the steps like a shadow, to blend in properly with the silence that prevailed all across the country. Keyholes gave access to no secret conversations. The drifting winds bore no words or music. Nothing was airborne but the government messages blaring from loudspeakers, reminding us that it was the day of the great cleanup, when all the neighbourhood residents had to bring out their brooms at the same time to clean the streets; or announcing a court case to be judged by three neighbours, bringing accusations against a former lawyer who had dared to cite the Napoleonic Code during a discussion; or denouncing families who had celebrated a marriage too joyfully or who had mourned too sorrowfully the loss of a dear one…I didn’t know that my mother took advantage of these public proclamations to whisper into Hà’s ear the address of a smuggler who would organize our departure from Vietnam.

  SIAM

  HÀ CROSSED THE GULF of Siam at the same time we did. She had managed to persuade the hairdresser to introduce her to her cousin, who worked for someone who knew someone who could recommend an organizer. No name and no promise had been given. In exchange for the gold taels demanded for her passage and that of her parents, she had been told to go to the hair salon as often as possible in order to learn the departure dates. This was how she became my mother’s messenger.

  We took the same bus at dawn on a morning that was supposed to seem like all others, my father still in bed and my mother in motion, noiselessly performing task after task. She put on my street clothes over two pairs of pants. I obeyed all of her instructions. I already knew that I was to ask no questions so as not to disturb her steady gaze, which served as a barrier to her tears. I can still see her rubbing my brothers’ nails with charcoal, unlike all the other days when a nurse filed them while another sang to distract them. As for my mother, she was wearing the clothes of our herb seller.

  During the trip from Saigon to the water, I kept my face flattened against her blouse, still impregnated with the scent of lemon balm, which refused to give way to that of coriander. This mixture of perfumes in the bus put me to sleep, sparing me the gouts of blood from the fish that the passenger standing near us was carrying in a bag, which sometimes dripped onto me when the vehicle veered to the left. Sleep prevented me from being afraid of the policeman who asked Hà and my brother Long, sitting two rows behind us, for their identification papers. Before dropping off, I saw Hà’s father slip some money into the hands of the one who was reproaching my brother Loc for wearing his hair long, the way capitalists did, a rebellious act that warranted a prison sentence.

>   BEIJING BẮC KINH

  ~

  north capital

  WE COVERED three hundred kilometres in ten hours. Towards the end of the trip, I didn’t hear the chickens anymore, clucking away in unison along with the noisy cạp cạp cạp of the ducks on the roof, shut into their woven rattan cage. The first time I ever ate Peking duck, our waiter meticulously sliced off pieces of skin that we sampled in rolls minus the meat, and I couldn’t help thinking about those ducks. I wondered if their skin also came off their flesh beneath the fiery heat of the roof, like the Peking duck’s, like mine, so puffy after the long trip. My feet had swollen in the dense and stagnant heat of the bus, overflowing the shoes’ thongs, stretching my skin to the point of transparency.

  When I was small and still extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, my father, when there was a power failure, settled me into our air-conditioned car to put me to sleep. He would lay me down beside him, then drive through the city. His hand caressed my damp hair, and he said: “My daughter is fermenting like yogurt.” As well, he compared my hands to balls of dough, the little brioches that my mother and I prepared together every Sunday. According to my father, even Parisian bakers could not compete with my mother. What was more, even if he ate in the best restaurants in town, he insisted that no chef knew how to lift stuffed zucchini blossoms from the frying pan the way she did, just in time to preserve the texture of the petals. Only my mother had mastered their preparation and knew how to extract their sugar beneath the crisp, light crust of rice flour. Like other Vietnamese families, we put all the dishes out in the middle of the table at the same time, with one exception. My mother served my father separately, in order to save the best for him: the soft-shelled crab overflowing with eggs, the perfectly shaped sticks of fried potatoes, the most tender chicory leaves. It went without saying that the fifty seeds of the sugar apple were removed, and its sweet white flesh held out to him like an offering.