Vi Page 6

  BERLIN

  I SNUFFED OUT my mother’s last spark of hope when I went to join Tân in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Wall. Tân was there for work during the two months that marked the end of an era, the end of East and West, the end of a long separation. During his absence, I wrote him every day. I received two postcards in response to my letters. One card showed The Kiss, by Doisneau. He’d written on the back: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I kept the two with me everywhere I went: on my desk during classes, in my purse when I was out, beside the mirror when I was brushing my teeth. My name had never appeared so precious and so well rendered as it was in Tân’s handwriting. When he called me to suggest the trip, I abandoned my family after our Christmas celebrations to fly off to meet him.

  In front of the Brandenburg Gate, the Wall was lower and wider, which allowed us to climb on it and watch the crowd converging from both sides. Around us, languages from the four corners of the earth blended into one. The French journalist who lifted us from the ground to help us scramble up offered us the floor of his hotel room if we had no place to sleep. The Portuguese banker who pulled us onto the Wall offered us swigs from his bottle of liquor. A Dutch student shared a chocolate bar with us. I’d been very cold when we visited East Berlin during the day, but the constant greetings and embraces between visitors that evening kept me warm until Tân pulled me out of the arms of a Lebanese man, twice my size, who called us all habibi. And so I came down from the Wall, following in the grumpy footsteps of Tân.

  My brothers and my mother were not happy to receive the pieces of the Wall I brought back. In their eyes, they were proof of my escapade with Tân, which represented a lack of respect for my ancestors, my culture, and all the struggles and sacrifices of my mother.

  RIO DE JANEIRO

  IN ORDER TO NORMALIZE the situation and salvage what was left of our reputations, Tân’s parents organized our engagement with my mother. As of the moment when I prostrated myself before the altar of the two families’ ancestors, we had to call each other’s parents Ba and Má, “father” and “mother.” It was a given that Hà and Louis would take a plane from Rio de Janeiro to attend the engagement ceremony. Hà had insisted on doing my makeup and setting the traditional headpiece on my head. While she was taking out the rollers she had put in to make ringlets, as was the style in her day, she asked me to promise her I wouldn’t marry before I turned thirty. If I had not received such firm instructions from Hà, we would certainly have gone on to make preparations for the wedding, even as Tân had begun to react badly to my long hours at the law firm as an intern.

  Jacinthe was employed at another big law firm nearby. There were about twenty of us recruits working very hard, but also going out to eat together, often at the end of our days, around ten o’clock. Jacinthe had dozens of admirers. She quickly became known to the entire legal community. She had an overlapping canine tooth that gave her a remarkable smile, and her wild Amazonian hair also made her stand out in a crowd. She was one of the rare women who dared to wear Fanta-orange dresses, ivory pantsuits, earrings that weren’t pearls. She wore low-cut tops and sky-high heels with the natural grace of a woman equally feminist and feminine.

  At the first party we held in the apartment, so many colleagues came, along with their friends, that we lost count. Tân was irritated to find strangers asleep in my bed and others entertaining themselves in our bathroom. He left in the middle of the evening with a comment that marked the beginning of the end of our relationship: “You ‘work’ with these people?”

  As of that euphoric night amidst young people whose philosophy was work hard, play harder, Tân was no longer satisfied with the stews I cooked, or with the spaghettini with lemon zest, or the meat pies from Jacinthe’s parents. One evening he was so indignant to learn that I would not attend the upcoming anniversary of his great-grandfather’s death because of a company weekend retreat that he threw in the garbage the croque monsieur I’d prepared for him, plate and all. Jacinthe sprang from her chair like a lioness and chased Tân away. If I hadn’t begged her with a frightened and shamefaced look, she probably would have slapped him, in addition to shouting in her serious and powerful voice: “You don’t deserve her. Get out!”

  It took several weeks before I mustered up the courage to call Tân’s parents and ask them for a brief meeting. They insisted that their son be present. I brought them the earrings and necklace they had given me when we became engaged, as well as the diamond ring that Tân, in my presence, had bought at the last minute from an acquaintance of his mother, in full confidence and without having even looked at it.

  There was neither a box, nor an entreaty, nor promises. I had to consider myself privileged that Tân’s parents had accepted me as a daughter-in-law despite my shortcomings. I apologized to them for my mother’s absence. But as parents, they understood that I wanted to spare her this moment of dishonour. Tân’s mother concluded that my disobedience was responsible for the drama. I ought to have followed her advice and been friends only with those in Tân’s circle. He shut tight the door, mumbling that he’d known since the very start, as soon as I’d yielded to his first kiss in the automobile, that I was too Western.

  My behaviour had ruined the reputations of two perfectly respectable families. My mother had to answer questions from curious mothers and, worst of all, put up with their murderous remarks: “Letting her live alone was a mistake”; “Hà had a bad influence on Vi”; “What boy will want her now?”…

  I broke away from my mother. I broke my mother. As my father had broken her.

  CAMBODIA KMPŬCHEA

  ~

  land of Khmers

  I WOULD HAVE been broken myself had it not been for one of the lawyers in the office, a president of the Bar, who invited me to travel with her to Cambodia for a meeting with colleagues from Phnom Penh, Hanoi, and Luang Prabang. We discussed the writing of their civil code, the influence of French law after and without colonialism, the disappearance of the ideological frontier between East and West, between Communism and capitalism, and so on. The foreign experts in shirts and ties presented their analyses, making no reference to the bullet holes in the outside walls—and sometimes even inside, such as one that could be seen below the blackboard. While we emphasized the importance of judicial independence, a nine-year-old boy who walked every day from his village an hour from Phnom Penh to a school beside our meeting room copied every page of the English–Khmer / Khmer–English dictionary into his notebook, because his village had no books, and certainly no judge. If we ignored the amputees and the weapons resting on restaurant tables, it was easy to imagine the “Pearl of Asia” that Phnom Penh had been, with its sumptuous temples and villas. But all it took was a visit to the temples of Siem Reap, where you stumbled over the head of a Buddha, plundered and abandoned by a looter, to hear the footsteps of those marching towards death under the regime of Pol Pot.

  The image of skulls piled up by the hundreds, of children held by their feet and flung against the trunks of trees, became somewhat easier to process after my one-day visit to Siem Reap. In one of the Angkor temples, an old woman in a sarong pulled me by the hand to a corner bathed in light, where she delivered blows to my chest. The echo of ancient stones spread through my rib cage, and brought my life’s breath back to me. Thanks to the imprint of this bony hand on my skin, I dared to sit down and offer a pink satin ribbon retrieved from the bottom of my purse to the little girl who sold water and ant eggs to the tourists. While the sun was going down and I was wondering how to leave this young merchant to her futureless tomorrow, a group of three men passed before us. One of them was explaining in French to the other two that the city of Angkor covered a territory greater than that of Paris today and that you must not confuse the devatas, who served as guardians, with the apsaras, dancers able to seduce both men and gods. I wondered if the Communist inspector who had characterized my father’s two precious apsara sculptures as “cultural corruption” knew the difference. Perhaps he had co
nfiscated them because he was already taken with them, as I suddenly was by the third man in the group, who spent a long time trailing the ends of his fingers along the walls, following the curve of the apsaras’ smooth and provocative hands, open to what lay beyond.

  I flew back to Montreal the next day, with a clear and indelible picture of the back of that stranger’s neck and the arc of his shoulder. I never imagined that one day I would fall asleep in the hollow of that very neck.

  BOULEVARD RENÉ-LÉVESQUE

  ON MY RETURN, a fellow lawyer called me into his office to talk about a long-term aid project on political reform in Vietnam. Since he was known to be one of the most brilliant men in the country, I agreed unconditionally, not knowing that Vietnamese-Americans who dared to travel to Vietnam sometimes saw their houses vandalized, and that Vietnamese-Canadians demonstrated in front of Parliament against the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries. I boarded the plane totally ignorant of the highly sensitive and purely political nature of the project.

  Before finding a permanent office, we established our headquarters in the small hotel where our team was lodged. During the day, our rooms became our offices, and the restaurant, our boardroom. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We closed our doors late in the evening, at the same time.

  As for me, I spent a good part of the night searching through dictionaries of English–French / French–English / English–Vietnamese / Vietnamese–English / French–Vietnamese / Vietnamese–French, as well as unilingual dictionaries, because the word “software” did not exist in Vietnam during the 1970s, any more than “environment” or “ASEAN.” The Vietnamese language I knew was marked by exile and trapped in an antiquated reality, one that preceded the Soviet presence and the strong ties with Cuba, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania…More than thirty thousand Vietnamese live in Warsaw, and in Berlin the Vietnamese quarter is much larger than Montreal’s Chinatown. The history of Vietnam and the Vietnamese endures, evolves, and grows in complexity without being written down or told.

  TONKIN BẮC BỘ

  ~

  northern border

  I TRIED TO seek out some fragments of Vietnam’s twenty years behind the Iron Curtain by hanging around restaurant tables. Across from my hotel, there were several. One offered bánh mì sandwiches, another sautéed vermicelli, and many served Tonkinese soup, or pho. I ended my days with this soup, which in no way resembled that served in Montreal, Los Angeles, Sydney, or Saigon. The Hanoi version was sold with only a few slices of rare beef, while I had always eaten this dish with a dozen ingredients, including tendons, stomach, shank, Thai basil, and bean sprouts. People from the south of Vietnam love making fun of the economical and less extravagant mindset of those in the North, using the example of how many items constitute “a dozen.” In the North, the dozen represents ten units; in the centre-North, twelve; in the centre-South, fourteen; and in the Mekong, sixteen and sometimes eighteen.

  At first, I found very bland the pho made by the restaurant owner-cook on the sidewalk in front of my hotel. In time, I came to appreciate the simplicity that allowed me to taste the kaffir lime leaf in the chicken version, and the grilled ginger in the one made with beef. Obviously, I had to beg the woman not to season my bowl with a spoonful of monosodium glutamate, an ingredient that was precious during the war. During the difficult years, that salt was not used just to enhance flavour; it was the flavour itself, the only ingredient added to white rice. Out of habit, my restaurant owner-cook continued to rely on this product to round out the flavours, even though her soup now contained real chicken and even though meat was no longer rationed. However, some old reflexes helped her to follow the rhythm of the police raids. Their duty was to temporarily chase away people illegally occupying the public thoroughfare, but only on one sidewalk at a time. That allowed my cook and her husband to ask their four or five clients to get up with their bowls before they moved the table to the other side of the street. The police check lasted only a few minutes, and the neighbours had enough advance notice for the sellers to simply cross the street. Once, I finished my soup under a tree while marvelling at this perfectly synchronized choreography.

  TRÚC BẠCH

  ~

  white bamboo

  DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of my posting to Hanoi, I was as fascinated by the ability of a young child to sit on her father’s bicycle carrier without catching her feet in the spokes as by the drivers asleep on the seats of their moto-taxis. And even more by the six versions of the word “adore” in Vietnamese: to adore madly; to adore to the point of going rigid as a tree; to adore giddily; to adore to the point of losing consciousness; to the point of fatigue; to the point of losing one’s grip on oneself. I wanted to see everything, learn everything.

  Both our office and my apartment were situated on the peninsula in the Trúc Bạch neighbourhood that was reputed to produce the finest bells and bronze statues. We chose the location for the discretion of both the place and its inhabitants, who had inherited the austerity of the ancient prison built by an eighteenth-century noble to incarcerate his concubines whom he suspected of criminal activity. I was happy to be out of the way so as not to have to refuse for the tenth time in one morning a lottery ticket sold by war amputees; so as not to hear the conversations between expatriates about the roughness of the talc used by the masseuses for a hand job; so as not to be enraged when the indecently luxurious cars of the new millionaires passed by the five- or six-year-old shoeshine kids. Above all, I avoided the prettiest café in Hanoi, on the shore of the Lake of the Restored Sword, because I felt personally hurt by the rude remark of a foreign client about a waiter who didn’t know the difference between a macchiato and a cappuccino. Each time, I died a little from my cowardice in not defending these young boys who probably slept in their booths after closing and, most of all, who didn’t have the good fortune even to taste one of those coffees. On the other hand, I felt responsible for the hugely inflated prices charged to visitors, and sometimes for the rudeness the Vietnamese allowed themselves when they thought they were protected by the language barrier.

  I distanced myself from these discomforts and confused feelings by concentrating on my work. It was much easier to analyze a state-owned corporation on paper than to meet the employees who lived on the company property with their families. Similarly, organizing a seminar on the subject of citizen protection in the person of an ombudsman seemed less futile when I did not see the envelopes slipped into the files of highly placed bureaucrats to “contribute to their children’s education.”

  FRANCE PHÁP

  MY SIXTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD BOSS WAS the youngest man in my circle in Hanoi. He watched over me like a father, and urged me to accept invitations to various events. Often, the burden of my work enabled me to decline, with the exception of the July 14 celebration at the French embassy, as it was important for me to be there in support of the French-speaking world. Respecting protocol, I greeted a few people, who replied courteously without taking much of my time. And so it was easy for me to disappear behind the bronze sculpture of two storks at the back of the garden, in order to escape the conversation about the maid who had ironed a pleated skirt, “a collector’s item designed by Issey Miyake”; or about the restoration of a mahogany table with a mother-of-pearl centre that had been left out in the sun and the rain; or about the list of the first state corporations selected for the imminent arrival of the stock market in Vietnam.

  Vincent approached me, asking if I knew the difference between storks and cranes. “Storks clack their beaks but don’t sing, unlike cranes, who can cry very loudly while making love.”

  We left the embassy garden when the waiters began folding the chairs. Vincent took me back on his old Chinese bicycle, and I sat in front of him on the crossbar. He took the route that went past the former house of the governor of Indochina, where the milkwood pine’s flowers perfumed the entire neighbourhood. The next day, he came to fetch me for breakfast at the elegant Mme Simone �
�ài’s, where crepes were served with sugar and lime juice, along with homemade yogurt and croissants, called “buffalo horns” by the waiters. At lunchtime, he introduced me to peanuts roasted in fish sauce, which the “locals” ate with rice. In the evening, I pedalled at his side to Hồ Tây, where young lovers shared snails cooked in medicinal herbs. In less than twenty-four hours I saw that Hanoi was much more than the fifteen streets and six addresses that I frequented from day to day.

  In the space of just a few days, Vincent had offered me the world, explaining the behaviour of the female anopheles mosquito that transmitted malaria; the recent discovery of a new species of bird at the very heart of Phnom Penh; the existence of the baculum bone in the male genital organ of almost all primates with the exception of man…I hadn’t known that the discipline of ecologist-ornithologist existed, nor that it was possible to find undocumented birds within the territory of Vietnam. He had succeeded in persuading the government to establish protected zones after many years of concentrated and patient work, mingling with the people, learning the minority ethnic languages, amassing an intimate knowledge of the forests, some of which had begun to come back to life after the Agent Orange bombings, the fires, the tears of the children.

  CHAMPĀ CHÀM

  A VIETNAMESE MOTHER in exile had for a long time wandered through the Norwegian forests to withstand the absence of her son lost in another forest, in Vietnam, during their flight from guns, bombs, cataclysm. As soon as she had been able to return to her original forest, she had continued her search, and thanks to the birthmark on his left ear she had recognized her son, who had become a chicken seller. A Cham family had found the child on the lifeless body of his father, and had undone the band of cloth that had enabled the man to carry him. The baby certainly must have cried when his father fell. But how could the mother, who was running through the smoke after her older daughter, distinguish her son’s tears in the midst of all the others? Perhaps, too, the baby had awakened only after the chaos, like Jacinthe’s father, who slept in front of the television set and awoke when his wife switched it off. Vincent knew only that the baby, now a father, asked him to explain to his biological mother that he wanted to stay near his wife and three children on the land of his adoptive parents, even if he ran the risk of being mistreated as a “native.”