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  BRUGES

  MY FATHER INTRODUCED US to delicacies brought back from elsewhere, such as aniseed from Flavigny or foie gras, or the cantaloupes that were served in certain French restaurants in Saigon. He insisted on celebrating Christmas with yule logs and welcoming friends more often with chocolate éclairs than with black sesame or banana candies. For my third birthday, the cook was ordered to prepare a three-tiered cake with buttercream. Usually I was more attracted to rice and taro puddings or to ice cream served in brioche. That day, impelled by some mysterious desire, I bit into the first tier as soon as the cake had been placed on its stand. No one could believe that I was capable of an act so decadent and spontaneous. My father blamed the dog, which was tied up ten metres from the kitchen.

  I rediscovered this same outlandish and uncontrollable craving the first time I bit into a Belgian waffle. I recognized the texture of the dough and the taste of the granular sugar described by my father, who had been seduced by the aroma of melted butter at a waffle stand in the Brussels train station. I heard his voice when I strolled past the Bruges boutiques, where he had purchased a lace shawl for my mother. At the time, my father’s travelling companion preferred to offer some fabric to his wife, who immediately turned it into an áo dài. The next day she saw a young weather reporter on television wearing the identical outfit. And yet this cloth was impossible to find in Vietnam. She tried to include my mother in her jealous rage, imagining a number of different scenarios for taking a wrathful revenge, from a confrontation to a denunciation in the newspaper. While this woman was certainly correct in believing that my mother was the victim of similar conjugal transgressions, my mother remained impassive during her fit of anger. She only advised her not to humiliate herself by humiliating her husband’s mistress. Then she draped her lace shawl, as fragile as a breath of air, over her áo dài of silk, to attend a reception in honour of her father-in-law, Judge Lê Văn An. Her ears were adorned with the pair of pearls offered by her mother-in-law on the occasion of the birth of my twin brothers. Were she to encounter another woman wearing the same shawl, she would greet her with the self-assurance that she was the mother of the four children bearing the name of my father.

  One day, while I was napping in a hammock, my mother received the visit of a young woman with a child my age called Trí. Through the netting, I watched him shooting marbles. Bits of their conversation reached my ears, even though they were whispering. Before falling back to sleep, I saw my mother place in the young woman’s palm her gold necklace and bracelet, and I heard her tell the young woman to return to Cà Mau and to never again try to disturb my father.

  CÀ MAU

  CÀ MAU, known for the blackness of its swampy waters and its dense, dark forest, is located at the extreme southerly point of Vietnam. Surrounded by three seas, it is perfectly placed for flights by boat. We hid there with my half-brother, Trí, waiting for a sign from our smuggler. His mother, she who wore my mother’s chain around her neck, fed us for the two days preceding our departure. My mother offered to take Trí with us. Amid the chaos of fear, the silence and the darkness, Trí got on a different boat than ours with Hà, who had lost her parents in the crowd. We left Vietnam in three different boats. Ours docked in Malaysia without having encountered any storms or pirates. Hà and Trí didn’t have the same luck. Their boat was intercepted by pirates four times. During the last attack, Trí received an accidental machete blow from a man in an agitated state. My mother lied to his mother, saying that he was reported missing at sea along with Hà’s parents. My father never found out that he had lost a son.

  MALAYSIA

  MY FIRST NAME did not prepare me for facing storms on the high seas, and even less for sharing a straw hut in a Malaysian refugee camp with an elderly woman who cried day and night for a month without telling us the identity of the fourteen young children who accompanied her. We had to wait for the farewell meal on the eve of our departure for Canada before she suddenly related to us the details of her crossing. She had seen her son’s throat being cut before her eyes because he’d dared to throw himself on a pirate who was raping his pregnant wife. This mother had fainted at the moment when her son and daughter-in-law were thrown into the sea. She didn’t know what happened next. She only remembered waking up beneath bodies, to the sound of tears being shed by the fourteen surviving children.

  When the words began to pass between the pallid lips of this woman who was more like a ghost, my mother chased me from the hut in an attempt to safeguard the innocence of my eight years. It was a futile gesture, since the walls were made from jute bags and the ceilings from canvas. In any case, similar stories were being told around the well, in the dust, during our sleep, everywhere in the camp. I knew that we had to avoid the two men suspected of cannibalism during their voyage, and not to disturb the statue-woman who waited religiously from dawn to dusk for her baby to wash up on the beach.

  My mother became the de facto leader of the women with no husbands, because she demanded that my brothers help other mothers by bringing them containers of water.

  When we had arrived in the camp, the French and Australian delegations had just left. No one could tell us when they might return, or when delegations from other countries might be passing through. It went without saying that no refugee planned to live long-term in the camp. But our daily tasks rooted us, despite everything, in this hot and hostile land. New rituals fell into place: young boys got together at dusk around a palm tree whose trunk followed the horizontal incline of the ground, to play with marbles offered by one of the Malaysian supervisors; new lovers escaped behind the big rocks on the hill; artists sculpted pieces of the wreckage from boats. Quite soon, dragging one’s empty pail for three hours to reach the well became as banal as the pains from chronic dysentery. The discomfort of physical and mental proximity diminished, to the rhythm of spontaneous laughter and miraculous reunions. In this isolated world, friendships were born of the simplest bond. Two classmates became two sisters, two natives of the same town helped each other out as if they were cousins, two orphans formed a family.

  CANADA

  ~

  village

  THE CANADIAN DELEGATION was the first to receive us. My mother had organized a class in the camp. She taught mathematics in French to children, and the French language to adults. She had the good fortune to be taken on as an interpreter by the francophone delegations during the selection sessions. She didn’t know that the Canadian delegation offered interpreters the opportunity to immigrate. Because we were part of the first large wave of Vietnamese immigrants allowed into Canada, we had heard no rumours about the country, which we assumed was wintry for all twelve months of the year. My mother assured us that our Ðà Lạt roots would help us adapt to the cold. To me, she said that Santa Claus lived at the North Pole, very near to Canada.

  QUEBEC

  ~

  where the river narrows

  WE ARRIVED in the city of Quebec during a heat wave that seemed to have undressed the entire population. The men sitting on the balconies of our new domicile were all stripped to the waist with their bellies well in view, like the Budai, those laughing Buddhas who promised financial success to merchants and to others joy, if they rubbed their roundness. Many Vietnamese men dreamed of possessing this symbol of wealth, but few succeeded. My brother Long could not help expressing his happiness when our bus stopped in front of a row of buildings where abundance was on show many times over. “We’ve landed in paradise!”

  LIMOILOU

  LONG GOT BUSY finding us clothes more suited to the season, because my mother had bought only warm clothing from the itinerant Malaysian peddler, anticipating a cold Canada. She had been happy and proud to have found for me, in the wheelbarrow-boutique, a pair of red fake-leather boots, whose gloss made you overlook the torn lining inside. The right heel, worn down unevenly, gave me the walk of the little girl who must have got rid of the boots after wearing them for quite a while, since the zippers had been mended several times.
She became my imaginary friend, who urged me to put one foot in front of the other in a totally new world that frightened me, with its space and its far horizons.

  Like the chickens that boat-dwelling families raised in the hollow middle of thick lengths of bamboo, I preferred to stay motionless in our apartment, much too vast compared with our small plot of earth in the refugee camp. My body had adapted itself to the shape of my brothers and my mother. I’d slept surrounded by their arms, their ribs, and the unevenness of the ground. How to find oneself alone one day atop the softness of a mattress without being cocooned in the sweat of my family, without being lulled by their breath? How to suddenly lose the permanent presence of my mother? How to find one’s way before an endless horizon, with no barbed wire, no overseers?

  Given the absence of addresses in the refugee camp, we had resorted to visual aids: the woman who lends out needles has an enamel water pail with a handle; the German interpreter sleeps under a blue clothesline mended with rags; the hairdresser has a mirror nailed to a skinny tree trunk. To locate the dressmaker, you have to go past the rock where the monk meditates at dawn, turn left at the well, circle the latrines, and ask neighbours and passersby where she may be found. And so, with my eyes still unaccustomed to the vastness, how could I find my way in the midst of the wide, long boulevard whose trees all seemed perfectly identical?

  KOBE

  ~

  door of the gods

  AS THE ELDEST, my brother Long bore the burden of acting as head of the family. He took the place of both my father and my mother. He took care of us while my mother washed dishes at the corner restaurant until midnight. He taught us our address, our telephone number, and showed us how to greet people in French. He introduced himself to the neighbours and was friendly with them. He smiled at all the people he met, without exception: the lady on the ground floor behind her walker; the grasshopper-children on the third floor; the tattooed man; the young girl in her miniskirt and high heels. He opened doors and helped people carry their grocery bags. He swept up the cigarette butts, advertising circulars, and candy wrappers on the stairs. He played ball with the children. Within a few weeks, the whole neighbourhood knew his name. His years of apprenticeship in French in Saigon schools enabled him to grasp very quickly how the public transit system worked.

  He made his way through the city by bus, and asked the drivers, with confidence and pride, “May I have a transport, please?” And he was given a coupon to present to the next driver, which would let him continue on his way to the centre of town.

  My hero-brother persuaded the owner of a Japanese restaurant to hire him. He started as a busboy, and was soon promoted to the job of juggling utensils behind the hot plate. He transported the diners all the way to Kobe, a place where he’d never set foot. His acrobatic manipulation of the ingredients lent him a Japanese identity. While his clients were realizing their dreams of exoticism, my brother Long was making his way towards the realization of dreams of his own.

  UNHCR

  ~

  United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

  BEFORE ARRIVING in Canada, I knew only one initialism: UNHCR. The High Commissioner collaborated with the Malaysian Red Cross to deliver water and food to more than 250,000 Vietnamese refugees found in camps scattered all across Malaysia, and more particularly on the island of Pulau Bidong, where nearly 60,000 people lived. Many people were deployed throughout the territory to offer us shelter from the sun, the rain, and also from the coconuts, which were abundant on the island. Despite these precautions, a woman had been struck on the head by a coconut and lapsed into a coma. She had been washing her coconut-shell bowls and ladles when the accident happened. A representative of the Canadian delegation had tried to transport her to the hospital, but on account of a storm, the dinghy had not been able to reach the boat that would have taken them to dry land. This woman had survived the crossing of the Gulf of Siam, deprived of water and food for several weeks. She had been spared by pirates when they found her hiding in an oil drum. Unfortunately, she lost her battle with destiny during the night. She died with no family and no country.

  Unlike the fate that befell this woman, life guided us all the way to Canada. When we heard the news, I remember Long lifting me up to do a somersault in the air. As soon as we arrived on 3rd Avenue in the Limoilou neighbourhood, he wanted to get us on the right track by enrolling us in school as quickly as possible. He met with the teachers, oversaw our homework, and dreamed of a future for all of us. While Long had the charisma of my father and the daring of our mother, his twin, Lộc, and our brother Linh preferred to stay in the background. In the beginning, Long wanted them to study engineering, like all the Vietnamese students who had arrived in the 1960s. But Lộc chose to follow in the footsteps of a Quebec philanthropist who inspired him to become an oncologist. As for Linh, he seemed to have been born to spend his days and nights as a computer programmer. Long studied business, and capitalized on his experience to become the manager of the Kobe restaurant. As soon as he got his degree, his employer put him in charge of the second and third Kobe franchises in town. Later, he would invest in the creation of an Asian restaurant chain in shopping malls.

  At university, he became active in community life. It was rare to have no guests around our table, as our apartment became the meeting place for Vietnamese students editing a newspaper or setting up a soccer, badminton, or Ping-Pong team with a view to participating in the Vietnamese North American Olympics.

  Aside from the boots in the entrance hall and the winter coats piled on the beds, we might have thought we were back in Saigon. The typical aroma of Vietnamese kitchens scented the air, thanks to my mother. She immersed us in the odour of chopped and roasted citronella wed to crisp fish skin, or in that of young sprigs of bamboo sautéed then dipped in lime-flavoured fish sauce. The complicated dishes she served us took a long time to prepare; she wanted to feed us well, but she could not have done it without the help of Hoa, Long’s beloved.

  BÁT TRÀNG

  ~

  bát = bowl;

  tràng = territory,

  land, place

  HOA SHADOWED my brother Long from their very first philosophy class in college. She always brought along a second serving for him when he was in a meeting during lunch hour. Long had inherited from our father a beauty that attracted as many men as women. His friends wanted nothing more than to follow him around because he fulfilled their dreams. A boy who was studying science while suppressing his dream of becoming a singer was invited to organize an evening of Vietnamese songs in the space where theatre classes were given. The future doctor could then experience the joy of being onstage along with his friends who would have liked to be guitarists or dancers. A girl who explored the world through drawing was invited to contribute to the newspaper since her talent had no outlet in her chemistry and physics courses. Those young people who came first in their classes were sometimes secret poets whom Long allowed to sign their texts with a pseudonym so their parents would be none the wiser.

  Unlike those students, Hoa concentrated on her courses in nursing without harbouring any particular dream or talent. On the other hand, she was extremely adept and discreet in staying close to Long without getting in his way. Her greatest asset was responding to the needs and expectations of our mother. Long had always acceded to her demands even when they were unreasonable, for he knew the magnitude of what she had lost.

  My mother strictly supervised the size of Hoa’s crushed ice crystals before they were added to the glasses of coffee prepared in the Vietnamese way, that is, drop by drop. In Vietnam, the crushed ice was sold in narrow blocks more than a metre long. Here, Hoa had to create these blocks using condensed milk cans instead of ice trays. According to my mother, the shape of the ice influenced the taste of the coffee, just like the thickness of the shreds of roast pork when she was preparing the bì. She removed from Hoa’s cutting board the pieces that were more than a millimetre wide to cut them further, and took the knif
e out of Hoa’s hands if she accidentally pierced a chicken’s skin while deboning it. Every time the grocery stores had whole chickens on sale, the house would overflow with activity. Our mother would buy at least five, and spend a good part of the night deboning them completely before stuffing them through the smallest possible opening, so they would not collapse.

  From time to time Long organized picnics, and often he chose to serve this dish to his friends, who only had to cut a slice to have an entire meal on their plate. They did not suspect that each mouthful involved hours of work, humility, and obedience on the part of Hoa. She had to follow my mother’s strict orders concerning the two stages of cooking the rice for the stuffing, the size of the Vietnamese sausage cubes once they were cooked, the proper quantity of shiitake mushrooms, whose scent must enhance without being invasive…Hoa endured in silence all my mother’s demands, even when I was alone with her, peeling the skins off peanuts, one by one. Patiently, she showed me how to roll an empty bottle over the nuts in order to crush them without reducing them to powder.