Ru Page 2

  My mother wanted me to talk, to learn French as fast as possible, English too, because my mother tongue had become not exactly insufficient, but useless. Starting in my second year in Quebec, she sent me to a military garrison of anglophone cadets. It was a way that I could learn English for free, she told me. But she was wrong, it wasn’t free. I paid for it, dearly. There were around forty cadets, all of them tall, bursting with energy and, above all, teenagers. They took themselves seriously when inspecting in minute detail the fold of a collar, the angle of a beret, the shine of a boot. The oldest ones yelled at the youngest. They played at war, at the absurd, without understanding. And I didn’t understand them. Nor did I understand why the name of the cadet next to me was repeated in a loop by our superior. Maybe he wanted me to remember the name of that teenage boy who was twice my height. My first conversation in English started with me saying to him at the end of the session: “Bye, Asshole.”

  My mother often put me in situations of extreme shame. Once, she asked me to go and buy sugar at the grocery store just below our first apartment. I went but found no sugar. My mother sent me back and even locked the door behind me: “Don’t come back without the sugar!” She had forgotten that I was a deaf-mute. I sat on the grocery store steps until it closed, until the grocer took me by the hand and led me to the bag of sugar. He had understood, even if to me the word sugar was bitter.

  For a long time, I thought my mother enjoyed constantly pushing me right to the edge. When I had my own children, I finally understood that I should have seen her behind the locked door, eyes pressed against the peephole; I should have heard her talking on the phone to the grocer when I was sitting on the steps in tears. I also understood later that my mother certainly had dreams for me, but above all she’d given me tools so that I could put down roots, so that I could dream.

  The town of Granby was the warm belly that sheltered us during our first year in Canada. The locals cosseted us one by one. The pupils in my grade school lined up to invite us home for lunch so that each of our noon hours was reserved by a family. And every time, we went back to school with nearly empty stomachs because we didn’t know how to use a fork to eat rice that wasn’t sticky. We didn’t know how to tell them that this food was strange to us, that they really didn’t have to go to every grocery store in search of the last box of Minute Rice. We could neither talk to nor understand them. But that wasn’t the main thing. There was generosity and gratitude in every grain of the rice left on our plates. To this day I still wonder whether words might have tainted those moments of grace. And whether feelings are sometimes understood better in silence, like the one that existed between Claudette and Monsieur Kiet. Their first moments together were wordless, yet Monsieur Kiet agreed to put his baby into Claudette’s arms without questioning: a baby, his baby, whom he’d found on the shore after his boat had capsized in an especially greedy wave. He had not found his wife, only his son, who was experiencing a second birth without his mother. Claudette stretched out her arms to them and kept them with her for days, for months, for years.

  Johanne held out her hand to me in the same way. She liked me even though I wore a tuque with a McDonald’s logo, even though I travelled hidden in a cube van with fifty other Vietnamese to work in fields around the Eastern Townships after school. Johanne wanted me to go to a private secondary school with her the following year. Yet she knew that I waited every afternoon in the yard of that very school for the farmers’ trucks that would take us to work illegally in the fields, earning a few dollars in exchange for the sacks of beans we picked.

  Johanne also took me to the movies, even though I was wearing a shirt bought on sale for eighty-eight cents, with a hole near one of the seams. After the film Fame she taught me how to sing the theme song in English, “I sing the body electric,” although I didn’t understand the words, or her conversations with her sister and her parents around their fireplace. It was Johanne too who picked me up after my first falls when we went ice skating, who applauded and shouted my name in the crowd when Serge, a classmate three times my size, took me in his arms along with the football and scored a touchdown.

  I wonder if I haven’t invented her, that friend of mine. I’ve met many people who believe in God, but what I believe in is angels, and Johanne was an angel. She was one of an army of them who’d been parachuted into town to give us shock treatment. By the dozen they showed up at our doors to give us warm clothes, toys, invitations, dreams. I often felt there wasn’t enough space inside us to receive everything we were offered, to catch all the smiles that came our way. How could we visit the Granby zoo more than twice each weekend? How could we appreciate a camping trip to the countryside? How to savour an omelette with maple syrup?

  I have a photo of my father being embraced by our sponsors, a family of volunteers to whom we’d been assigned. They spent their Sundays taking us to flea markets. They negotiated fiercely on our behalf so we could buy mattresses, dishes, beds, sofas—in short, the basics—with our three-hundred-dollar government allowance meant to furnish our first home in Quebec. One of the vendors threw in a red cowl-necked sweater for my father. He wore it proudly every day of our first spring in Quebec. Today, his broad smile in the photo from that time manages to make us forget that it was a woman’s sweater, nipped in at the waist. Sometimes it’s best not to know everything.

  Of course, there were times when we’d have liked to know more. To know, for instance, that in our old mattresses there were fleas. But those details don’t matter because they don’t show in the pictures. In any case, we thought we were immunized against stings, that no flea could pierce our skin bronzed by the Malaysian sun. In fact, the cold winds and hot baths had purified us, making the bites unbearable and the itches bloody.

  We threw out the mattresses without telling our sponsors. We didn’t want them to be disappointed, because they’d given us their hearts, their time. We appreciated their generosity, but not sufficiently: we did not yet know the cost of time, its fair market value, its tremendous scarcity.

  For a whole year, Granby represented heaven on earth. I couldn’t imagine a better place in the world, even if we were being eaten alive by flies, just as in the refugee camp. A local botanist took us children to swamps where cattails grew in the thousands, to show us the insects. He didn’t know that we’d rubbed shoulders with flies in the refugee camps for months. They clung to the branches of a dead tree near the septic tanks, next to our cabin. They positioned themselves around the branches like the berries of a pepper plant or currants. They were so numerous, so enormous, that they didn’t need to fly to be in front of our eyes, in our lives. We didn’t need to be silent to hear them. Now our botanist guide whispered to us to listen to their droning, to try to understand them.

  I know the sound of flies by heart. I just have to close my eyes to hear them buzzing around me again, because for months I had to crouch down above a gigantic pit filled to the brim with excrement, in the blazing sun of Malaysia. I had to look at the indescribable brown colour without blinking so that I wouldn’t slip on the two planks behind the door of one of the sixteen cabins every time I set foot there. I had to keep my balance, avoid fainting when my stools or those from the next cabin splattered. At those moments I escaped by listening to the humming of flies. Once, I lost my slipper between the planks after I’d moved my foot too quickly. It fell into the cesspit without sinking, floating there like a boat cast adrift.

  I went barefoot for days, waiting for my mother to find an orphan slipper belonging to another child who’d also lost one. I walked directly on the clay soil where maggots had been crawling a week before. With every heavy rainfall they emerged from the cesspit in the hundreds of thousands, as if summoned by a messiah. They all headed for the side of our hill and climbed without ever tiring, without ever falling. They crawled up to our feet, all to the same rhythm, transforming the red clay soil into an undulating white carpet. There were so many that we gave up before we’d even started to fight. They became invin
cible, we became vulnerable. We let them extend their territory until the rains stopped, when they became vulnerable in turn.

  When the Communists entered Saigon, my family handed over half of our property because we’d become vulnerable. A brick wall was erected to establish two addresses: one for us and one for the local police station.

  A year later, the authorities from the new Communist administration arrived to clean out our half of the house, to clean us out. Inspectors came to our courtyard with no warning, no authorization, no reason. They asked all those present to gather in the living room. My parents were out, so the inspectors waited for them, sitting on the edges of art deco chairs, their backs straight, without once touching the two white linen squares covered with fine embroidery that adorned the armrests. My mother was the first to appear behind the wrought iron glass door. She had on her white pleated miniskirt and her running shoes. Behind her, my father was dragging tennis rackets, his face still covered in sweat. The inspectors’ surprise visit had thrown us into the present while we were still savouring the last moments of the past. All the adults in the household were ordered to stay in the living room while the inspectors started making their inventory.

  We children could follow them from floor to floor, from room to room. They sealed chests of drawers, wardrobes, dressing tables, safes. They even sealed the big chests of drawers filled with the brassieres of my grandmother and her six daughters, without describing the contents. It seemed to me then that the young inspector was embarrassed at the thought of all those round-breasted girls in the living room, dressed in fine lace imported from Paris. I also thought that he was leaving the paper blank, with no description of the wardrobe’s contents, because he was too overwhelmed by desire to write without trembling. But I was wrong: he had no idea what brassieres were for. In his opinion they looked like his mother’s coffee filters, made of cloth sewn around a metal ring, the twisted end of which served as a handle.

  At the foot of the Long Biên Bridge that crosses the Red River in Hanoi, every night his mother would fill her coffee filter then dip it into her aluminum coffee pot to make a few cups that she’d sell to passersby. In the winter, she placed glasses containing barely three sips into a bowl filled with hot water to keep them warm during conversations between the men sitting on benches raised just a bit above the ground. Her customers spotted her by the flame of her tiny oil lamp sitting on the tiny work table, next to three cigarettes displayed on a plate. Every morning, the young inspector, still a child, woke up with the oft-mended brown cloth coffee filter, sometimes still wet and hanging from a nail above his head. I heard him talking with the other inspectors in a corner of the staircase. He didn’t understand why my family had so many coffee filters filed away in drawers lined with tissue paper. And why were they double? Was it because we always drink coffee with a friend?

  The young inspector had been marching in the jungle since the age of twelve to free South Vietnam from the “hairy hands” of the Americans. He had slept in underground tunnels, spent days at a time in a pond, under a water lily, seen the bodies of comrades sacrificed to prevent cannons from sliding, lived through nights of malaria amidst the sound of helicopters and explosions. Aside from his mother’s teeth lacquered jet black, he had forgotten his parents’ faces. How could he have guessed, then, what a brassiere was for? In the jungle, boys and girls had exactly the same possessions: a green helmet, sandals made from strips of worn-out tires, a uniform, and a black and white checked scarf. An inventory of their belongings took three seconds, unlike ours, which lasted for a year. We had to share our space by taking ten of those girl and boy soldier-inspectors into our home. We gave them one floor of the house. Each of us lived in our own corner, avoiding contact except during the daily searches, when we were obliged to stand face to face with them. They needed to be sure that we had only the essentials, like them.

  One day our ten roomers dragged us to their bathroom, accusing us of stealing a fish they’d been given for their evening meal. They pointed to the toilet bowl and explained to us that the fish had been there that morning, hale and hearty. What had become of it?

  Thanks to that fish, we were able to establish communication. Later on, my father corrupted them by having them listen to music on the sly. I sat underneath the piano, in the shadows, watching tears roll down their cheeks, where the horrors of History, without hesitation, had carved grooves. After that, we no longer knew if they were enemies or victims, if we loved or hated them, if we feared or pitied them. And they no longer knew if they had freed us from the Americans or, on the contrary, if we had freed them from the jungle of Vietnam.

  Very quickly, though, the music that had accorded them a kind of freedom found itself in a fire, on the rooftop terrace of the house. They had received an order to burn the books, songs, films—everything that betrayed the image of those men and women with muscular arms holding aloft their pitchforks, their hammers and their flag, red with a yellow star. Very quickly, they filled the sky with smoke, once more.

  What became of those soldiers? Much has changed since the brick wall was put up between us and the Communists. I went back to Vietnam to work with those who had caused the wall to be built, who’d imagined it as a tool to break hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps even millions. There had been reversals, of course, since the tanks first rolled down the street that ran past our house in 1975. Since then, I had even learned the Communist vocabulary of our former assailants because the Berlin Wall fell, because the Iron Curtain was raised, because I am still too young to be weighed down by the past. Only, there will never be a brick wall in my house. I still don’t share the love for brick walls of the people around me. They claim that bricks make a room warm.

  The day I started my job in Hanoi, I walked past a tiny room that opened onto the street. Inside, a man and a woman were arranging bricks into a low wall that divided the room in two. The wall got higher day by day, until it reached the ceiling. My secretary told me that it was because of two brothers who didn’t want to live under the same roof. The mother had been helpless against this separation, perhaps because she herself had erected similar walls some thirty years earlier between victors and vanquished. She died during my three-year stay in Hanoi. By way of legacy, to the older child she left the fan without a switch, to the younger the switch without the fan.

  It’s true that the brick wall between those two brothers can’t be compared to the one that existed between my family and the Communist soldiers, nor do these two walls carry the same history as do old Québécois houses—each wall has its own story. It is thanks to that distance that I’ve been able to share meals with people who were the right arm and the left arm of Ho Chi Minh without seeing the rancour hovering, without seeing women on a train holding old Guigoz powdered milk cans in their hands as if they were jars of magic potion. For the men shut away in re-education camps, it was a magic potion, even if the cans held only browned meat (thịt chà bông): a kilo of roasted pork shredded fibre by fibre, dried all night over the embers, salted, then salted again with nớc mấm obtained after two days of waiting in line, two days of hope and despair. The women lavished devotion on those filaments of pork, even if they weren’t sure of finding their children’s father in the camp they were setting off to visit, not knowing if he was dead or alive, wounded or sick. In memory of those women, I cook that browned meat for my sons now and then, to preserve, to repeat, those gestures of love.

  Love, as my son Pascal knows it, is defined by the number of hearts drawn on a card or by how many stories about dragons are told by flashlight under a down-filled comforter. I have to wait a few more years till I can report to him that in other times, other places, parents showed their love by willingly abandoning their children, like the parents of Tom Thumb. Similarly, the mother who made me glide on the water with the help of her long stick, surrounded by the high mountain peaks of Hoa L, wanted to give up her daughter, pass her to me. That mother wanted me to replace her. She preferred to cry over her c
hild’s absence rather than watch her running after tourists to sell them the tablecloths she had embroidered. I was a young girl then. In the midst of those rocky mountains, I saw only a majestic landscape in place of that mother’s infinite love. There are nights when I run along the long strips of earth next to the buffalo to call her back, to take her daughter’s hand in mine.

  I am waiting till Pascal is a few years older before I make the connection between the story of the mother from Hoa L and Tom Thumb. In the meantime, I tell him the story of the pig that travelled in a coffin to get through the surveillance posts between the countryside and the towns. He likes to hear me imitate the crying women in the funeral procession who threw themselves body and soul onto the long wooden box, wailing, while the farmers, dressed all in white with bands around their heads, tried to hold them back, to console them in front of the inspectors who were too accustomed to death. Once they got back to town, behind the closed doors of an ever-changing secret address, the farmers turned the pig over to the butcher, who cut it into pieces. The merchants would then tie those around their legs and waists to transport them to the black market, to families, to us.

  I tell Pascal these stories to keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school.

  I remember some students in my high school who complained about the compulsory history classes. Young as we were, we didn’t realize that the course was a privilege only countries at peace can afford. Elsewhere, people are too preoccupied by their day-to-day survival to take the time to write their collective history. If I hadn’t lived in the majestic silence of great frozen lakes, in the humdrum everyday life of peace, where love is celebrated with balloons, confetti, chocolates, I would probably never have noticed the old woman who lived near my great-grandfather’s grave in the Mekong Delta. She was very old, so old that the sweat ran down her wrinkles like a brook that traces a furrow in the earth. Her back was hunched, so hunched that she had to go down staircases backwards so as not to lose her balance and fall headfirst. How many grains of rice had she planted? How long had she spent with her feet in the mud? How many suns had she watched set over her rice fields? How many dreams had she set aside only to find herself bent in two, thirty years, forty years later?