Vi Page 4

  I wondered whether her discretion derived from the long tradition in Bát Tràng, her hometown, of working clay to produce fragile porcelain, or from her acceptance of being born weak. Hoa knew in advance that university would be difficult for her, if not impossible. Her only hope was that Long would give her a chance to express her love. As with her profession as a nurse, she expected nothing in return, neither from her patients nor from Long, especially not a formal proposal of marriage, made on her birthday.

  HONG KONG

  ~

  fragrant port

  HOA’S RETIRING PERSONALITY could also be attributed to her stay in a crowded camp in Hong Kong, where simply taking a breath impinged on another’s territory. Like all the refugees, she’d learned very quickly how to disappear into a bubble to be alone. The first time I heard in Quebec the expression “You’re in my bubble,” I thought the person addressing me was making a declaration of friendship by permitting me to share his thoughts, his inner space, when what he in fact wanted was for me to back off, back away. Unlike in Western culture, which encourages expressions of feelings and opinions, the Vietnamese keep them jealously to themselves, and speak of them with great reluctance, because this inner space is the only one inaccessible to others. All the rest, from academic grades to salaries to sleep, is in the public domain, as are love affairs.

  NHA TRANG

  ~

  river of reeds

  I WONDER IF THE openness regarding personal details derives from the tropical temperatures that discourage the shutting of doors, windows, and walls; the lack of space between the two or three generations living under the same roof; the dependence on family ties; or whether it’s the weight of family history, which must be borne out of gratitude, and sometimes as a burden. The child’s success belongs to his parents and ancestors. Every family member is responsible for all the others, out of solidarity. The stronger support the weaker. Otherwise, any personal success would be marred by an inadequate sense of duty and honouring of the clan. In the same way, each individual feels and displays guilt as a result of others’ mistakes. I remember a man with his son and daughter who went on their knees before my mother because of a theft his wife had committed. He’d brought back the two gold chains with bells attached that my mother had put around my ankles so she could hear me running in the house. I’d held out my feet to my mother, but she’d knelt down to attach the jewels to the ankles of the two children still on their knees. I never saw that nursemaid again, who was guilty not only of theft but, above all, of the shame with which she had burdened her children. My mother often told us that we were lucky to have parents who would never commit fraud or other unseemly acts. But sometimes, even honest parents cannot resist the pressures exerted by the history of a people, passed on from one generation to another.

  A friend of my mother’s, a former teacher, told us one winter’s night that in one of her classes in Nha Trang, a young student whose father had fought with the South and an equally young student whose father had sided with the North fell deeply in love before learning about the family history on either side, because they had grown up after the reconciliation of North and South. When the two mothers heard the news, they asked to meet the teacher so that she might help them prohibit a union between enemies. The mothers also appealed to the friends of their children, hoping they might urge them to separate. One day, as the caretaker was sweeping the courtyard with the constant and repetitive sound of reeds scraping the cement, the boy’s mother burst into the classroom and threw herself in front of the blackboard, crying out, over and over: “He is dead!” The students’ tears joined her cries, the noise escaping through the windows to cross the yard and reach the other rooms.

  Everyone cried, except for the young girl who was in love. Her eyes stayed dry, and her body upright. She left school at the end of the day along with her classmates, walking steadily, her breathing regular, her body language and gestures normal. She calmly held out the coupon to the attendant in order to retrieve her bicycle, wheeling it beside her to the exit before placing her conical hat on her head, the strap under her chin. She pulled on the rear panel of her áo dài, holding it in her right hand as she lowered herself onto the old leather seat with the gracefulness of youth, and pedalled away. Her face betrayed no emotion, nor did the steady rhythm of her legs. From far off, she resembled all the other students, whom romantics compared to white butterflies. The adolescents knew that together they were an embellishment to the streets as they left their classes with their uniforms in movement. The student, whose heart was not broken but stopped, deviated in no way from this virginal beauty. She arrived home and greeted her mother, who awaited her with a snack of gac fruit sticky rice—a square cake on which the word “happiness” is carved in Chinese, and which newlyweds offer to guests during the marriage ceremony at the altar of their ancestors.

  The orange hue of the perfumed rice, tinted by the flesh of the gac, could get lost in the bright-red abundance of the tablecloths, the decorations, and the bride’s dress. But the guests always found them, since the gac only ripened once a year. Out-of-season marriages had to bypass this fruit of paradise, as some called it. That is why her mother had been very happy to receive, as a guest at a wedding, this rich, orange-hued cake. She presented it as an offering to her daughter, who thanked her politely, tracing the word “happiness” with her finger for fifteen minutes without eating it. The teacher had followed her student to the house. Since many Vietnamese houses were completely open, with the ground floor often transformed into a commercial space during the day, she felt at the same time as her student’s mother that an emptiness had arrived that sucked all the air out of the room.

  Suddenly, the motorcycle horns, the noise of the two rollers compressing the stalks of sugar cane at the neighbour’s, the chatter of the customers awaiting their glass of juice— all went silent. It was only when the young girl’s body landed on the pavement that her mother and the teacher cried out. They tried to revive her by rubbing her temples and feet with tiger balm, but were unable to bring her back to consciousness. The teacher offered to stay with her student that night. The mother reminded her that it was useful to watch over the living, but that nothing could be done for the dead. Even if the young student had never been allowed to read Romeo and Juliet, or see the film Love Story, or hear of Tristan and Isolde, even though her literary knowledge was restricted to the biography of Ho Chi Minh and some war heroes, even if the decorations pinned to her father’s uniform guaranteed her a privileged future, she had chosen to join her love. She had freed herself from the burdensome history that was the legacy of a war she had not known, by walking towards the beauty of Nha Trang’s sublime sea.

  COPENHAGEN

  ~

  merchant’s harbour

  ALL THROUGH MY EARLY CHILDHOOD, we went to the sea almost every month for “a change of wind,” as my father said. The salt water miraculously healed the cracked skin on my grandmother’s heels, and cleared up my own frequently congested nose. The salt air helped my brothers grow, and amplified our laughter around the dried cuttlefish sold on the beach by itinerant merchants. Two cuttlefish, perfectly flat and grilled over a few red coals, fed the whole family for the whole afternoon, since they were eaten strand by strand. The taste of these elastic filaments lasted longer than a stick of Juicy Fruit in my mouth. Those joyous and light-hearted moments in the sand did not prevent me from fearing the sea, as much for its vastness as for its depth and its beauty. My father strung the most beautiful floats around my waist, and pushed me towards the moving waters. I thought I would die every time a wave took me away from my father’s breath on my neck. He turned the duck’s head of my float towards the horizon, thinking that the smooth surface would calm me. He also pivoted me in the other direction so that I could see our beach umbrella and my mother hidden behind a big hat and her sunglasses, with a towel on her head. The two points of view paralyzed me. That unhealthy fear would remain with me, until the day we learned that the oce
an had not swallowed up Hà’s boat.

  After several weeks at sea with a failed engine, and with the refugees running low on food, her boat was rescued by a Danish freighter and Hà went directly to Copenhagen without passing through the camps and without meeting the other passengers again, for fear of seeing in their eyes the reflection of her own body, which had been subjected to multiple rapes. Thanks to her knowledge of English, she was able to integrate easily, working in hotels, where she learned about massage therapy. After taking some courses, she reinvented herself as a massage therapist. The clients said that she repaired their bodies. Very quickly, her calendar filled up a month in advance. She lengthened her working hours in order to accommodate everybody. But one day she refused to treat a man after he had filled out his health form. His name was Louis. There was nothing special about him, but something in his look had unsettled her. She said that she’d had to clench her fists in order to hide her fingers, which were shaking like the leaves of a poplar tree.

  In Denmark, she was able to concentrate on the well-being of others. She was able to detect disappointment in a deltoid, shame in a latissimus dorsal, resignation in a gluteus medius…She sought out all the sorrows in the muscle fibres in order to alleviate them and, when possible, eliminate them by repeating her mother’s movements, seizing the pain of her little girl’s wounds in her hand and tossing it in the air to make it disappear. Her fingers had the gift not only of hypnotizing her clients but also of leaving the weight of their impressions on the skin long after the end of the session. She always refused to be massaged by her colleagues, however. She feared that the pressure of a hand on her skin would shatter her fissured body. She wouldn’t know how to reassemble the pieces, or to put some order into the thousand fragments that would have been spread out before her, like a town after a hurricane has passed through. Her clients found her serene, gentle, even wise, while Louis had immediately sensed her extreme fragility, and the chaos dormant within her, awaiting the first sign of weakness to undo everything. Louis waited until a stormy night, until the last day of the year, to approach her in a bus shelter, and offer her some tea. After a long day putting bodies into balance, assuming her clients’ wounds, Hà felt her legs give way. Louis caught her and loved her.

  OTTAWA

  ~

  to trade

  HÀ FOLLOWED Louis to Ottawa, where he returned at the end of his mandate in Copenhagen. She found my mother by looking for the names of her relatives in all the telephone directories. Louis brought her to our door. Hà and my mother talked through that first night. I heard them weep, and sometimes go silent. During the long conversation, the word “luck” returned again and again, as they described the experiences and the ordeals they had lived through. Once she found love with Louis, Hà began offering massage therapy to damaged women, women in distress and without resources in shelters. She also helped them to look at themselves in the mirror, to listen to a Bee Gees song with her, or to choose an article of clothing in the collective wardrobe, to be worn for job interviews. It was thanks to the friendship of those women that she dared to start counting the number of slaps received, the number of pirates encountered, the number of steps that had separated her from her parents on that night of escape.

  MANHATTAN

  ~

  island of many hills

  I DISCOVERED MANHATTAN when I was thirteen. Hà took me there with Louis for a weekend. She’d suggested to my mother that I come to stay with her during the holidays. My mother gave her permission to look after me as if I were her daughter. Hà began by unbuttoning the collar and sleeves of my blouses. In restaurants, she demanded that I choose between the hamburger and the pizza. Between vanilla and chocolate, between apple juice and a milkshake. Then came the choice of colours for the walls of the guest bedroom so it would become mine as of the second year of Ottawa visits. Like my brother Long, Louis and Hà entertained often and had many friends. Louis made it his mission to bring me out of the kitchen and introduce me to the guests. When they arrived, he supported me by placing his hand in the middle of my back, while at the end of the meal he placed it on my shoulder to stop me from getting up and collecting the plates. During the evening, he always suspended the conversation at an opportune moment, inserting a question that forced me to give an answer, to be wholly present. It was with them that I learned of the existence of Burundi, Chile, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Guadeloupe, and also NATO, the OECD, and the International Court of Justice. Louis had friends from many different backgrounds, often nomads because of their diplomatic jobs. Or, on the contrary, they had chosen to be diplomats in order to live everywhere in the world without ever becoming citizens, without ever belonging to a single place.

  My brother Long often reproached my mother for having entrusted me to Hà and Louis, since the stable and easy path he’d imagined for me in pharmacology or medicine had been replaced by a career that would prove unpredictable and chaotic.

  SHANGHAI

  ~

  upon the sea

  WHILE LOUIS was posted to Shanghai, Hà offered me an airplane ticket so I could join them during the summer holidays. I spent my winter and spring evenings studying Chinese from a book I found at the local library. It contained an analysis of a thousand characters classified according to the number of strokes in each one. To my great surprise, the character for the number one, a single horizontal stroke, was considered the most important, because it illustrated the primordial unity, the fusion between sky and earth, the horizon, the beginning of the beginning. Each character told its own story, and when it was combined with one, two, or three others, new stories formed, transforming the initial meaning. And so in this way I followed the series proposed by the book:

  to speak

  to speak + to bend the body over to greet = to thank

  to speak + man = messenger / letter

  to speak + to rejoice = to narrate, to say

  tree

  two times tree = bushy, dense

  three times tree = severe / dark

  fruit + tree = result / full complete

  heart

  heart + brain = reflect

  heart + to look attentively = to hope / to remember

  heart + to skewer = unhappiness / to be pained

  I had embarked on a race against time. I did not expect to master in six months the minimum of two to three thousand characters required to be able to read a newspaper. But I wanted to prepare myself as best I could to prove myself worthy of Louis and Hà’s gift.

  As soon as I landed in China, I felt reassured that I could read the signs at the airport for Exit, Baggage, Immigration, and in the street the signs for Restaurant, Bookstore, and Hospital. I had brought along just under a thousand words that I recognized in writing. But I didn’t know how to pronounce them, let alone how to put them together into sentences. The kitchen helper at Louis and Hà’s residence, A Yi, took me under her wing because I held my two hands out to her to receive a cup of tea with the humility of a child relating to an elder, rather than with the ease of one of her employers’ guests; also because I almost choked swallowing the velvety, fibrous pods of edamames; and, most of all, because I answered her with the help of a pencil, tracing characters with the skill of a four-year-old schoolchild. When I wasn’t in class, I followed A Yi to the market, to the cleaner’s, and, once, to Suzhou, during a three-day holiday.

  SUZHOU

  ~

  heaven on earth

  A YI’S PARENTS still lived in their ancestral home along the canal. My Chinese wasn’t good enough for me to ask them questions about their love story in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, beneath images of Mao Zedong, under the one-child policy. But food brought us together, her mother and me, since I was the one who found on the ground the tooth she’d broken while chewing on a ligament from chicken feet sold at the window of the house across the way. The five-spice taste of the feet’s marinade was familiar to me, as was the checkerboard with elephants on which A Yi’s father played with his
son-in-law, next to us.

  A Yi’s husband came to join us on his return from a trip to France, where he had been an interpreter for a highly placed bureaucrat on a commercial mission. I assumed that he’d studied French because he was a francophile. He politely corrected me, making it clear that he’d become a francophile as a result of studying French. He had been one of the country’s best students when he wrote the university entrance exam. The authorities had assigned him to the language department, more specifically, to French. He pronounced his first bonjour at the same time as his friends. They never had to ponder nor to choose their profession and their future, because the government had decided for them. If A Yi’s husband had been able, he would have chosen agricultural engineering, something that had always been a passion of his. But reasoning with himself, he acknowledged that, in that case, he would not have been one of the privileged individuals authorized and called upon to travel. He would not have slept above the clouds, smelled the conifers on the taiga, witnessed the devotion of the faithful who came to sweep the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon on their birthday. “The State knows you better than you know yourself,” he concluded, singing Je ne regrette rien.