Woodpeckers wake me to a pale morning, the sun hardly up. I bow the drapes to the walls, throw wide the balcony glass doors, and step into light, a robe about me against the cool. There are no woodpeckers. The tide has fled out twenty yards during the night, and women crab over exposed rocks, plastic sandals holding them on sharp shoals. They chip loose clams with miniature sickle-like picks. Their wide, conical hats shadow their white peasant shirts, dark pants. My mouth recalls the clams and oysters, the shellfish sweetness of yesterday's dinner.
At once, perhaps feeling my eyes, they turn, looking up at my whitewashed balcony, at meâthe prodigal scionâresplendent in a white terry-cloth robe, hands on rail, peering down from towering heights at their toils. Their seashell-shaped hats tilt back, revealing their human faces, their luminous eyes. Unnerved, I retreat inside, and with deliberate casualness free the drapes from their wall ribbons. Through a slit in the curtain, I spy the clam women pecking at the rocks.
In the afternoon, unable to take a siesta the way the Vietnamese do, I hike downtown to look for a gym. The cliff workers, napping in the shade, beckon me to join them.
Come and rest. Where are you going in this noon sun? It'll boil your brain. Crazy Viet-kieu!
A mile farther along the paved main drag, cyclo drivers pack the shade of a street-corner tree, each expiring in his own cab like a barber on a slow day.
Catching wind of me a hundred yards off, they perk up like coyotes. I see them drawing lots among themselves. The winner eases out of the cab, mounts the saddle of his cyclo, and lazily swoops toward me, in no hurry at all. I groan inwardly. He pulls along calm and friendly for the kill, pretending to be interested in practicing English and making a friend. “How are you? Where you from? You like Vietnam? What's you name?” After a minute of chatting and pedaling next to me, he invites me to ride his cyclo. I tell him in Vietnamese,
“No, thanks, Brother. I really want to walk.”
His eyes flip to the back of his head. “Fuck!” he exclaims, then laughs as he abandons the chase, shouting over his shoulder at me.
“Shit. I thought you were Japanese.”
He banks the pedicab back to the pack, tosses up his arms, and shouts to his buddies,
“He's a Viet-kieu!”
They hoot, laughing at his misfortune.
The weight gym is the size of a three-car garage with prisonbarred windows. A movie poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger is plastered over the main wall, where images of Uncle Ho should have been. Arnold preens his beef in six more images predating his meteoric rise in Hollywood. Hoang, the seriously muscle-bound owner of the gym, enrolls me as a member for two dollars a month even though I tell him I'll only be in town for a day or two. He seems pleased that I chose his gym over the big hotel Nautilus and spas geared for foreigners. The muscle boys of Vung Tau stomp around the hot, smelly room in various states of nudity, dripping pools of sweat. Some are in jeans, others are in boxer shorts. Half are wearing rubber flip-flops, the other half are barefoot. One old guy with sprung ribs and chopstick arms is benching in his white cotton briefs.
I slap a big fat grin on my face, a very un-Vietnamese thing to do, but there is plenty of testosterone sloshing around in the cramped space and I don't want to step on anyone's toes. One by one, the muscle boys approach me tentatively with preambles like
I have an uncle in America; Someday I'll go to America; My sister is sponsoring me. My family tried to escape in'75, but we got caught; I'm going to America next year; My fiancée is sponsoring me to immigrate there, but I love this town and my family so much I don't think I can go.
Tam, a musician my age, introduces himself. Solely on his salutation, I know we will be friends. This is easy because the Vietnamese
form of address allows two people to assess each other and extend overtures of friendship. It has several tiers, each indicating the nature of acquaintance (informal, formal, business, friends, intimate) as well as the hierarchy. Just by pronouns used, one can discern the type of relationship between two people. For instance, if Tam refers to himself as
toi
(I) and calls me
anh
(big brother, or, in this context, you), then the relationship is formal and equal, with neither having the upper hand despite age; however, if Tam is in fact younger than me, then unless there is something elseâsocial, economic statusâto normalize the age difference, Tam is being disrespectful by not referring to himself as
em
(little brother). And if I were, say, fifteen years older than he, Tam should use
chu
(uncle) and
chau
(nephew). There are many forms, including regional variations.
Tam calls me
ban:
friend.
I like him instantly. He reminds me of an old childhood friend from my days at the French Catholic school in Saigon, who used his own name, in the third person, instead of “I” and called me “friend” rather than “you.” Tam invites me to one of his regular gigs at a hotel disco.
After dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Ba, I walk to the Grand Hotel. It sits not all that grandly on a side street near the beachfront boulevard, one of the two top dogs in this sleepy tourist town. It lodges bureaucrats, foreign oil moguls, and high-caliber journalists. It is the only place with live music every night.
The red-coated bellhop directs me past the faux-marble fountain and up the spiraling staircase to the nightclub on the second floor next to the expensive restaurant. I tread carefully through the chambers replete with Oriental rugs, linen tables, and mirrors. The place is empty save menial servantsâand fourteen stunning women sitting around a table. In unison, they turn to look at me. I feel a joltâa finger-in-light-bulb-socket charge. A hitch in my stride. This must be a meeting for the most beautiful women in the city. I am keenly aware of my faded black jeans, grimy cycling shoes, and sun-bleached mock turtleneck, my only good shirt. I grin like an idiot and hurry down the hall into the nightclub.
Tam greets me the moment I step inside, shaking my hand and maneuvering me through the dark room. “I'm so glad you came,” he shouts in careful English, over Mick Jagger howling from the stereo.
He is wearing the requisite white shirt, dark slacks, and a garish polka-dot tie as broad as a meat cleaver. “I am very happy,” he says, smiling. “We can talk now. I play with my band soon, but we talk.”
We sink down into black leather sofas. Tam tries to say something in English but his vocabulary fails and so he switches to Vietnamese.
“Friend, Tam is very pleased friend has come to see Tam at Tam's workplace. It means much to Tam to have friend here as Tam's guest. It is an honor.”
I return his formal words:
“It is an honor to be with you, friend. Thanks for the invitation.”
Tam grins, his Boy Scout face as bright as a good deed. “Now we practice English, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You are very on time. You are very American.”
“Why is being on time so American?”
“Because American people value time. My teacher say time is money for American people. American people work very, very much. More than Vietnamese. So America is better, stronger than us.”
“But Vietnamese work six days every week. Americans only work five days. Americans have many holidays. Vietnamese have only the New Year.”
He reconsiders the point. The waitress comes, and Tam asks me what I want to drink. Beer, wine, cognac? Etiquette requires him to offer me the best in the house. I insist on having whatever he is drinking, which happens to be a diluted orange juice sweetened with sugar. The drink of the day for everyone. A beer in this place would cost him a day's wage.
An older woman herds the roundtable beauties into the roomâstunning girls of all shapes and sizes, the youngest probably in her teens, the oldest not over thirty, each clad in satin slips of creative cuts. They spool automatically on the deserted dance floor and begin to move. They cavort in pairs to the throbbing rhythm, turning, swaying fronds in waves. The black lights make their smiles glow. The disco ball runs hands of light across their taut bodies. My desires, the red light strobing on their faces.
Tam chuckles good-naturedly
“Little sisters think they have a guest: You-friend.”
“Me?”
He chuckles.
“Does friend see anyone else here besides the band and the bartender? It doesn't matter that friend doesn't dress well. Friend is a foreignerâa Viet-kieu. Friend can have any girl friend wants. They all think friend has money. No one can be a tourist in another country without being very rich.”
“I'd disappoint them.”
“Don't worry. Friend is here as my guest. Besides, we are like family, the cua ve and the band. The same hand feeds us. We eat from the same dish,”
says Tam.
Cua ve
are taxi dancers / hospitality girls. The price of a dance with them is a drink. A man goes to the bar and buys two drinks, one for himself and one for the woman of his choice. The bartender brings the woman the drink, usually a diluted orange juice or colored water, and directs her to the man who bought the drink. A man who doesn't want to dance can take the woman back to his table for a chat and, usually, light fondling.
A party of six Chinese businessmen marches into the club. The instant they drop their hefty bottoms into the vacuum suction of the leather sofasâeven before the waiter has a chance to take their drink ordersâthe savvy suits sense there are greater predators than themselves in the room. They struggle to sit upright in the quicksand couches, their fatty necks sprung taut, nervous. The
cua ve
spread out, blanketing the empty room, closing in on succulent prey. The suits whisper-negotiate fiercely among themselvesâprobably debating who ought to be sacrificed. As one unit, they heave and pop themselves out of the couch and buck through the door. I hear the collective sigh of the
cua ve
over the thumping music.
Not another soul comes through the door. No money to be made tonight. Madame rolls her eyes in disgust and clicks her stilettos into the kitchen. A retired string of marionettes, the
cua ve
drape their limbs over the chairs along the wall, collapsing against each other, yawning. Two girls curl up together and doze off like Siamese twins; the spunkier ones joke among themselves. A card game starts at one table. A pair of girls rumba slowly around the room, enjoying themselves completely at ease in the absence of patrons. They are very good. I like watching them.
When the song ends, Tam waves them over. They cross the room toward us, each holding a glass of diluted orange juice in front of her like a truce flagâa polite and thoughtful declaration that they don't expect us to buy them drinks. They are smiling.
“Hello, Brother Tam,”
says the taller girl, with straight black hair spilling down to her waist. She bows, showing proper respect to Tam, who is a few years her senior. To me she also bows and says,
“Hello, Brother.”
The other young woman, with short hair and a tight red body dress, echoes her friend's greeting. Tam makes the introductions and invites them to join us.
We take turns talking, shouting in that awkward mode of communicating in a disco. They are a lively pair, polite and full of curiosity. We chat and dance until the club shuts down early due to zero business. Kim and I make a date for lunch the next day.
I simply forget I have to leave for Hanoi. First, it is lunch. Then lunch and dinner. Then breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Kim and I wrap our days around each other. It seems so natural, as though this is part of my itinerary, a scheduled stop on my journey. She takes me to all her favorite haunts. When we dine out, she insists on taking turns paying. “
I want to pay,”
she says. “
I want to do like Western women do. We're friends, aren't we?”
I nod.
“Then let's do it like Westerners do. Let's take turns. I don't want to be a Vietnamese girl who always waits for her male friend to pay.”
I protest that she makes so little during this off-season. She hushes me, looking upset.
She has a mane of black hair, straight and long, as fine as silk, as supple as thoughts on a breeze. It is a veil that threads across her face, her musings unknowable to me. It curtains her off and lifts only when she is ready. But she is always ready, I forget things lurk backstage. When she chooses, she is up-front, honest. There is no false churchy demureness about her. We are eating in a restaurant and I tell her I notice people treat her differently, look at her in a way I do not like.
“It doesn't matter,”
she says, shrugging.
“I am an untouchable in this town. People know where I work and what I do. I am like trash. So it doesn't
matter that we're seen together in public. It's not like I'm a nice girl or anything. No nice girl can ever be seen talking to a Viet-kieu. If they are, people will call them used material. It doesn't matter with me. I like you, and maybe part of the reason why I like you is because you're a Viet-kieu. You might like me, but it doesn't matter, I'm only a taxi dancer.”
She turns and smiles at me with dark eyes.
“Let's go swimming down at the beach.”