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  TAIWAN ĐÀI LOAN

  SHERYL TURNED OUT to be a perfect daughter-in-law compared with Linh’s Taiwanese wife. Mei was so pretty that the Chinese restaurants in Montreal always placed her at their entrances, as a hostess. Linh fell in love with her the first time they met, and moved to Montreal as soon as he could. They seemed to be living a perfect love, even if Mei finished working in the early morning hours, long after the restaurants closed. Linh never complained about waiting for her to come home at night since he used the time to work on his consultant contracts in addition to his daytime job.

  At their wedding, I’d heard guests sharing under their breath the Vietnamese saying: “A beautiful wife belongs to others.” In Linh’s case, his wife was swallowed up by gambling; Linh was replaced by the casino. In only a few years, she lost her youthful air, her innocence, and the house they owned. Despite his well-paying jobs, Linh had to give up on the marriage. My mother had never allowed herself to lament her break with my father, but she surrendered to Linh’s sadness. Perhaps Linh’s pain stretched her fighting spirit to the breaking point. When I saw her facial muscles sag after what happened, the image that came to my mind was the English expression the straw that broke the camel’s back. Since then, I’ve looked for an equivalent in French. I’m often advised that it’s la goutte qui fait déborder le vase, “the drop that makes the bowl overflow.” But that expression does not do justice to my mother’s collapse. She withdrew and turned in on herself as if she had been broken. Fortunately, her grandson was born, which gave her a reason to pull herself together.

  VIETNAM VIỆT NAM

  MY MOTHER MADE ME return to Hanoi, promising me, hollowly, that she would come to visit me as soon as Long completed the acquisition of a new franchise. Hoa took me to the airport, and comforted me with the news that they were expecting a second child. “That will put her back on her feet. Don’t worry.”

  As usual, I’d boarded the plane with a suitcase full of books. At the time, only photocopies of photocopies of The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, of The Quiet American, and of some Lonely Planet guides were being sold in the street by illiterate youngsters in rags. Sometimes, two or three Hanoi bookstores offered copies of college books left behind by expatriates. Overwhelmed as I was by all aspects of the project I was working on, I tried to read what was available so I’d be able to participate, without being too anxious, in meetings with the directors of state corporations, farmers, the National Assembly’s Committee on Social Affairs. Those readings also enabled me to not count Vincent’s days of absence minute by minute.

  After the Christmas holidays, Vincent landed in Hanoi two days after me. I prepared us a Vietnamese fondue that evening, with a clear bouillon in which we cooked slices of chicken, beef, and pork, as well as clams and shrimp. Vincent’s favourite part was the basket of greens that accompanied the meats. His “Vietnamese mother” had helped me to find the water lily rhizomes, the young bamboo shoots, the water spinach, the banana flowers, the squash blossoms, the okra, the straw mushrooms…and a kind of shy mimosa with a taste and texture he particularly liked. This dish was tastier if it was eaten in a group, because the bouillon was richer when a large quantity of ingredients was involved. And so, even though I would have preferred to keep Vincent all to myself, I shared him with our friends who were in Hanoi. The ephemeral but intense friendship with expatriates made for a very special family. Since movies, theatre, and any other cultural activity did not exist in foreign languages, we had to provide our own entertainment.

  Sundays, we would spend three or four hours at a huge brunch at the Sofitel Hotel, which offered an oasis of food not to be found on the local market: rosettes de Lyon, knuckle of ham, blanquette de veau, brioches, gravlax, crèmes brûlées, oysters, cassoulet, coq au vin, baba au rhum, sautéed foie gras, langoustines, Paris-Brests, tarte Tatin, a platter with a thousand cheeses…On other days of the week, we often circulated from one home to another, to treat our friends to our discoveries. Drew, an Australian who divided his time between India and Vietnam, introduced us to Indian spices; Antoine, who was Lebanese and a true gourmet, knew how to grill fish to perfection; Marianne, a Brazilian from Rio, prepared more cocktails than food; Philipp, a German, was always prompt, even in a country where time was an elastic concept; Nicholas, our big polar bear, did everything with love. Around the table, we often matched the number of member nations of the United Nations Security Council, representing many different disciplines, and with hundreds of stories to tell.

  The night of the fondue, Vincent politely shooed away our guests earlier than usual, because he wanted us to open our Christmas presents alone together. For several months he had been growing winter heather in the mountains because he’d heard me comment at length on the thicket of heather in a photo of their house, rather than marvelling at their ancestral dwelling at Orléans in the background. After several attempts, he succeeded in filling a jardinière that fit perfectly on the windowsill. My second present was a bag of white-fleshed cherries, a fruit that was out of season but as delicious as the red ones of autumn. During my childhood in Vietnam, we all drew cherries in the same way, attached by their stalks, even though none of us had ever seen, let alone tasted, one. There was a kind of fruit with the same name, sơ ri, but it didn’t have anything like the same features. One was big, the other little; one sweet, the other acid. The most remarkable difference concerned the pit. The Vietnamese sơ ri contained three soft pits, whereas the other possessed only one hard one. Vincent’s cherry enabled me to keep for myself the half containing the pit when we bit into it at the same time. But immediately he put his index finger on my lips while kissing my temple. I was astonished that he noticed, because I don’t think my father ever knew that my mother took the seeds out of his bananas and cucumber slices before serving them to him. Similarly, Tân certainly thought that his wallet attracted his keys thanks to an invisible magnet, just as his jackets automatically took their places on their hangers. Despite the coffee that dripped through the filter while he was taking his shower, and the carefully shined shoes that awaited him beside the door, he was blinded by the grey sky, the cry of a neighbour’s alarm clock, the hike in income tax and sales tax.

  I could have cut off ten centimetres of my hair and Tân wouldn’t have noticed, whereas the least sign of a burn immediately attracted the attention and care of Vincent. He had had “Vi” tattooed above his right hip, at the level of his belt, a mark that presaged my third present: a ring adorned with a square sapphire and diamond chips on all four sides. It had belonged to his grandmother, who had taken it straight from her little finger the day after their Christmas Eve celebration. Vincent had shown her photos of me. From her large collection of jewels she had chosen to leave her favourite grandson this first ring given her long ago by her jeweller husband.

  Vincent’s sapphire touched and overwhelmed me, as I had lost my four grandparents, and had not tried to see my father again since my return to Vietnam. My story had been cut short, reinvented. No object of my mother’s or mine spoke of the generations, unlike the altar of ancestors that bore witness to all marriages, anniversaries of deaths, of New Year’s ceremonies going back at least a hundred years. Had this piece of furniture become the focal point of another family since it had been taken away from us? Had the souls of my ancestors followed it or had they stayed with my father? Or had they also fled along with us in order to bring us to safe harbour? The sapphire ring that I wore on my finger bound me to Vincent’s love, but most of all it included me in the long history of his great family, even if that history was still unknown to me, and remains so.

  SINGAPORE

  I WAS RESPONSIBLE for a mission to Singapore with a group of Vietnamese advisers when Vincent received the news about his grandmother’s serious condition after a banal fall. He got the first plane out to join his entire family and to be with the woman who had taught him to play his first notes on the piano, to recite his first poem, to knot his first bow tie. In his olfactory memory, no perfum
e was as sweet and comforting as that of the jam made from melons gorging with honey that she served warm with Brillat-Savarin cheese melting in the afternoon sun. The photo of bouquets of lavender hanging from the beam over her kitchen helped me imagine the young Vincent carrying a wicker basket and following his grandmother into the fields. He adored the woman who had provided him with his French roots despite a life as the son of a diplomat, changing countries and friends to the rhythm of elections, and living in borrowed shells, like a hermit crab.

  We had no way to communicate during my mission to Singapore because of the six time zones that separated us and my heavy schedule. When I returned, Vincent called me, his voice muffled by sadness and fatigue. During his second telephone call he was more optimistic, as his grandmother had begun to eat a few mouthfuls of applesauce. The danger was over, which allowed him to anticipate returning to Hanoi. And then—nothing. No more news, other than a note I received two weeks after his last call: “My love, I miss you.”

  Vincent’s “Vietnamese mother” was also in the dark, with no news from him. But she was used to his absences and his unpredictable returns. She continued to take care of the house, gathering up yellow leaves and faded petals, dusting the shutters and his bicycle, replacing the fruits in the basket in case he returned during the night. I asked her not to change the sheets or wash Vincent’s clothes, which I slept with. She consoled me with congee and ginger tea. No one had any news, not even his colleagues. His organization’s headquarters in London had no contact information other than that for Vietnam, since he’d already been living there for seven years.

  XÓM CHÙA

  ~

  village of pagodas

  I MOVED into Vincent’s little house. His “Vietnamese mother” and I did our best to move nothing around, to alter nothing. I saved every one of his hairs found in the dust, in the matting, in the hammock’s mesh. His sandals and slippers I wrapped in tissue paper so the imprints of his feet would remain intact. I bought the same candles, the same detergent, the same shampoo. In that way, when I arrive at the house, I plunge into the same ambient scents. I did not keep the same circle of friends, though, because it became hard to avoid discussing theories regarding his disappearance. In any case, those people change cities and countries frequently, depending on their postings and contracts, always of uncertain duration.

  My two constant ones, Hà and Jacinthe, took turns coming to visit me. Jacinthe brought me photos of my mother and her grandchildren. Hà gave me one of the diamond earrings my mother had received at the time of her wedding. She had swallowed both of them to pass through the anti-capitalist body search in Saigon, and had found only one three days later. During her flight in the boat, she had hidden it in the seam of her pants’ waistband. Once she arrived in Quebec, she preferred to work uncountable hours to satisfy our needs rather than sell the diamond that bore witness to her status as wife to my father: Madame Lê Văn An.

  I begged Hà and Jacinthe not to tell her about the existence and disappearance of Vincent. She would be shattered to learn that her daughter was living the same fate, the same story, the same abandonment, as herself.

  ƯỚC LỆ

  I WENT TO SEE Aline, a long-time friend of Vincent’s, who for ten years or so had been running an orphanage at Ước Lệ, about twenty kilometres from Hanoi. This Swiss woman had been a young traveller when one night she’d heard a baby crying in the alleyway behind her little hotel, in the backpackers’ neighbourhood. She’d responded to the tears, which had cast a spell on her and kept her in Vietnam ever since. Aline told me that the orphanage received and would continue to receive an automatic and generous contribution from Vincent every month. The money was deposited directly into its account without any formality. She also reminded me that Vincent had often gone off with no return date. I should not be concerned.

  I took refuge in the orphanage during all my free time, because there was always a wall to paint, a meal to prepare, a bandage to change, a child to console, a wheelchair to push, a back to rub, a pail to carry, a lullaby to sing. One night, while we were washing the dishes together, Hạnh, a volunteer at the orphanage, recognized my family name. Hạnh adored my father so much that her description seemed to me to be the antithesis of that provided by my brothers, my mother, and all those who had known him. During our second conversation, Hạnh admitted that she’d recognized me because of the photographs of my brothers and myself that covered the walls of my father’s room. Some had been sent by Hà, others by my mother. Hạnh lowered her eyes to hide her tears when she told me that my father had made several attempts to escape, nine in all. Out of pride, he wanted to leave on his own, not sponsored by my mother, and certainly not by my brother Long. To experience the passage was essential to him. He’d first sold everything he possessed to pay for the early voyages. Later, he’d taught English, worked as a waiter in restaurants, and, under a pseudonym, translated a book offered him discreetly by an Australian client. Against all expectations, The Thorn Birds became a bestseller, enabling him to try to escape once more. Unfortunately, he’d missed the wave of boat people. Even refugees who had already arrived and settled in camps were being sent back to Vietnam.

  My father considered that life was fair in rewarding my mother with our presence and in punishing him with our absence. “He knows you’re working in Vietnam,” concluded Hạnh. She had the delicacy never again to talk to me about my father. Perhaps she understood that I needed silence in order to hear his voice again, and to find a path back to him.

  HỒ HOÀN KIẾM

  ~

  Lake of the Restored Sword

  THE SEASONS jostle each other and return with the same music, except on this first day of spring when Aline, Hạnh, and I can have tea, coatless, at the café near the Lake of the Restored Sword. We are celebrating the admission of one of the orphan children to a neighbourhood school. There are many customers, double the usual number. The easy smiles and spontaneous laughter of the people strolling by give the long lianas of the weeping willows a festive air. But in all the faces around me, I realize that none of them know Vincent. Vincent’s Hanoi no longer exists.

  I hesitate to announce to Aline and Hạnh the end of my posting in Hanoi. I hesitate to follow my urge to retreat to Nowhere, Oklahoma. I hesitate to escape Vietnam a second time. I hesitate to ask Hạnh for my father’s address. I hesitate to leave Vincent’s faded sheets, to abandon my hammock weakened from its torn stitching, to throw away the pens whose ink has dried, to take down the mosquito netting, mended every ten centimetres.

  I hesitate to leave myself, to abandon the Vi of Vincent.

  I hesitate because I intend to leave without saying anything, taking away nothing, except for Vincent’s long blue scarf.

  As I am hesitating, Hạnh decides for me: “Your father is in Hanoi…at the orphanage. He’ll be living there for the next month.”

  “We’ll take care of him until he’s better,” adds Aline.

  Before me, the crowd surges towards the other end of the lake. The shell of the hundred-year-old tortoise has just reappeared, bringing good tidings, according to belief.

  Born in Saigon in 1968, KIM THÚY left Vietnam with the boat people at the age of ten and settled with her family in Quebec. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, restaurant owner, and commentator on radio and television. She lives in Montreal and devotes herself to writing.

  SHEILA FISCHMAN is the award-winning translator of some 150 contemporary novels from Quebec. In 2008 she was awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts. She is a Member of the Order of Canada and a chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec. She lives in Montreal.

 

 

 
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