“She became too American,” Old Quan had said to me after Chi's suicide. An elderly Vietnamese American who had seen his share of horrors, Old Quan was, for a time, my good friend and mentor until I, too, became
too American
for him.
“Your sister Chiâtoo selfish, too into herself. She wants to be herself. That's wrong. All wrong. To live a good life, you live for others, not for yourself. Your parents bring you into this world so you be what they want. What do you think: I plant a tree for shade. I water it. I put fertilizer in soil. I wait and I work hard for tree, but when tree is big, tree don't give me shade. Maybe tree give me thorns. Is that good? What do you think?
“Your sister, she not know how to ignore desire. Not know how to accept herself. She not see her duty to parents. To her, desire is aboveâhigherâthan duty to parents ⦠She not know sacrifice.”
We always worked for those behind us, those who brought us into the world and pointed out the gate to the Empire beyond the barbed wire. Our father sacrificed for us as his father had sacrificed for him, each one of us racking up a debt so large we'd never dare to
contemplate pursuing our own dreams. No, there are no independent visionaries in a line of sacrifices.
Since I met Su four days ago, I have been in bed, feverish and lonely, coming up empty-handed in the village of my birth. I am bedridden, waking up merely to sip broth and orange juice. And spewing my innards into the toilet. I am feverish. I am cold. My joints ache. Maybe it is a stomach flu. I don't know. I keep asking the innkeeper if Su has dropped by to see me. She hasn't. Having given Su much of my money as a gift, and wining and dining Mrs. Sau-Quang's sons as etiquette demanded, I cannot afford to go to the doctor. I am nearly out of cash. Phan Thiet doesn't have a large bank where I can dredge my bank account for my emergency funds. I will have to end the trip here and return to Saigon. I don't have the strength to go on. What is the point anyway?
It can't end here. I must beg my way north, crawl if I have to. It seems not only cowardly but selfish and dishonest to quit now. Not after all Chi went through. I rise from bed on the fifth morning. My fever breaks sometime in the night and my sinuses are clear. I know I am better as I wake. The stench drifting into my room from the sewer and the salt flat is just as bad as it was the first day I arrived. I pack my panniers and head to the door without breakfast.
“No. No!”
Hai, the inn owner, beseeches me, hands flapping like crow wings.
“You're not leaving today, are you? You, you are so sick. Are you crazy? You're weak. You'll catch an ill wind and you'll end up in the hospital.”
“I'll be fine,”
I assure her, putting on my confident face.
“I feel great. I get sick, but I recover fast.”
Two lies. I feel woozy and clammy. Recovery of any sort isn't my strong suit and I haven't been sick in yearsânot even a coldâuntil I set foot in Vietnam.
“Just one more night. How about it? I'll cook something special for dinner,”
Hai offers, smiling sweetly, practically begging.
The truth is I can't afford to stay here much longer anyway. Hai has been overcharging me blatantly, quadrupling the price of everything from orange juice to aspirin to laundry service to room fees. She is
bleeding me to death financially and my unanticipated departure is something of a shock to her business plan.
“Thank you, Sister. But I have been looking forward to seeing Mui Ne for a very long time. You know, it's where my family escaped.”
“Ah, your border-crossing point,”
she says appreciatively.
With that, I ride away, dropping vague promises to come back for a few nights if I make tracks through town again. I fight the bike into the sandy road, joining the light traffic of trucks, bicyclists, and motor scooters. I feel exhilarated to be back on my bike. The sea wind wipes away the bedridden fuzziness in my head, giving me a clean slate. A few miles out, the land turns arid. Over a couple of rises, I peek at blue water. The road hems the coast for a mile or two, perching lightly on a rocky lip not ten yards above the surf. Then, abruptly, the road sweeps down into a coconut forest and I remember it all, our walking down this road with my mother twenty years ago. It is plush, shady, and airy beneath the palm canopy. Between this green roof and the white sand carpeting there is only quiet air bathing the ropy trunks of the coconut palms. With only the soft hiss of the sea breeze, the silence is eerie.
Deeper in, I realize it isn't quite the same place I'd left. The forest now teems with people. They have thinned it out and built huts on one-acre lots. I leave my bike by the side of the road and plod across the sand to see if the forest is thoroughly perforated with dwellings. It is. An old man rises from his hammock nap to tell me not to waste my time. The whole peninsula is populated, he says. They migrated down from central Vietnam a decade ago. I sigh, thank him, and go on my way. There are too many children and the school system can't teach them all at once so there are two sessions, one in the morning, one in the evening. At the changeover during midday, hundreds, maybe thousands, of white-and-blue uniformed schoolchildren flood the road. Soon they shed their uniforms, and the sandy floor of the thinned-out coconut forest is alive with half-naked children playing, shouting, running. They trail me, smiling, waving, yelling,
“Tay! Tay!”â
Westerner, westerner.
I track the road, over and over, looking for the precise spot where my family had staged our escape, but it is hopeless. The landmarks are
all gone. The locals say that for every house swept away in the last big storm several years ago, five more took its place. There are even restaurants, shops, and hotels right on the beach. One very fancy resort, featured in several travel magazines, hogs up a prime tract of beachfront land and boasts a manicured garden and South Pacificâstyle bungalows, protected behind a Cyclone fence, topped with barbed wire, besieged on all sides by ramshackle huts inhabited by skinny, half-naked people. Despite the fancy amenities, it reminds me of Minh Luong Prison. I avoid the commercial lodging and scout the area for a camping spot.
I climb the brow of a hill. Off in the distance, a mighty flotilla of wooden fishing vessels moors in the crescent cusp of the bay. Bobbing gently in the winter sea, nose to the beach, they are the color of driftwood save the bright, gaudy trimmings of eyes and dragon heads like those of the ancient Phoenician warships. The bay is rimmed by a village thriving like undergrowth beneath the palms. A fisherwoman, mending her strung-up net, suggests I go to the other side of the peninsula and camp on the back bay. It's more peaceful, she explains. The kids won't pester you there. “Pester” in context could mean anything, including stealing.
On the other side is a long, gorgeous stretch of near-white sand dunes lapped by three-foot swells. It is desolate in comparison. The fisherfolk switch bays by the season. Here, the late December wind whips onto the beach with a mild cut, just enough to chill someone bare-chested. Behind the dunes where the road ends is the most forlorn café I've ever seen. There is no structure save a couple of strings of lights and laundry lines. The sand, speckled with bits of ocean-splintered wood, is strewn with rusted lawn chairs, a few plastic tables, and six tattered sun umbrellas. The proprietor, a nervous Vietnamese man named Han, serves three Brits warm beers. I lean my bike against a tree and ask the man for permission to spend the night on one of his hammocks under the stars. He says that he'd welcome any company to help him guard the café against burglars. The Brits tell me, in their polite British way, that they think I am insane and leave in a car with their tour guide and driver.
In the middle of the night, a cop comes by on a motorbike and shines his flashlight in my face. Han tells the cop to fuck off. The cop
tells Han to go fuck himself. I groan and pull my jacket over my face. They squabble, apparently friends. The cop wants Han to fry him some eggs. Han tells the cop to fuck off because he doesn't have any eggs. If you want eggs, you'll have to go down to one of the farms and tax them out of some eggs. I doze off and wake up a few minutes later to see them drinking rice wine and the cop eating a bowl of instant noodles. They tell tall tales under Christmas lights powered by a car battery.
Chi-Daughter
“In the end
⦔ Grandma intoned, summoning the very words a Buddhist monk had composed for Chi on the day of her birth,
“in the end, it will be as if she had no brother or sister. No father or mother. Her life will be a difficult journey. She will die at thirty-two, alone of a broken heart. This child should be loved, for in the end she will have no one.”
A Vietnamese first son is worth his weight in gold, all his life. But I don't think that's why Chi wanted to be a boy. She was just never meant to be a girl. That simple. I had always known she was different. Unusual. A strong, quiet, and thoughtful first child, Chi carried herself in such an unassuming way that I instinctively looked to her as my older brother. Perhaps I even resented it as a child because I was the first son. While I reaped the prodigal privileges, I suspected they should have been her honor.
Nine months after we came to America, we weaned ourselves from the charity teats of the First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana. Mom couldn't handle being the only Asian family in town and Dad wanted to be closer to his brothers who had settled in California. A bunch of ingrates, we loaded a U-Haul with the secondhand loot the church had given us and said amen to the South. We bolted through
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and right into sunny Californiaâas close to Vietnam as you can get, my uncle had claimed. With a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket, the only footing Dad could afford was in south San Jose, smack in a den of poverty, alcoholism, drugs, and domestic violenceâa street where the cops came by daily, so regularly that the residents had a running joke: If you can't find cops at Winchell's Doughnuts, you'll find them on Locke Drive.
We lived in a gutter-level unit that flooded with every heavy rain. Barbed wire separated our backyard from no-man's-land, a desolate plain of bulldozed dirt, beyond which trickled a toxic creek weeded with trash. Standing at our front door, I could wing a rock over the chain-link fence of the city dump down the street. It was a colossal stadium of debris, four football fields wide and three stories deep, the sides treacherous ravines.
It wasn't as bad as it looked. Even though, on humid summer days, the stench stewing off the raw trash turned my stomach and made Mom sick, the tainted air became as familiar to us as our own body odors. Besides, it was a treasure land of odd trinkets and toys, and the creek provided a vast stomping ground infested with imaginary enemies and very real poison oak. Seagulls wheeled across the sky, making the dump look like beachfront property. My brothers and I became street urchins, lurking in empty lots, the creek, and the dump because the local kidsâwhites, blacks, and Mexicansâwere out to kick our skinny Asian asses. Some of them routinely took potshots at us with BB guns.
Go home, Chinks!
Kids' style of picking fights was different in America. In the old country, kids took a running slug at the sight of a foe. Here, they squared off like cocks, traded insults, and shouldered each other for an eternity before the first blow landed. After a month of fighting, usually walking away with the heavier damage, we pocketed stones and slingshots whenever we left the house.
While we boys reveled in the family's poverty, Chi was largely confined to the house for chores and changing Kay's diapers. With the family on welfare, Dad, a worn-out man in his mid-forties with eight mouths to feed, studied eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for his Associate of Arts degree in computer programming, a two-year program which he was trying to cram into nine months. The migraine
headaches and the malaria chills he picked up during his time in the Viet Cong prison plagued him. He merely clenched his jaws and chiseled away at the books. Mom, who hardly spoke any English, spread out a vinyl mat in the living room, put a swivel office chair in the middle, brought out the dresser with the mounted mirror, and was in business. She cut hair for the neighborhood children and permed fancy heads of the local ladies, many of whom were also in the dire strait of public assistance. Mom got the idea from looking around the neighborhood.
In the suburban slum of Locke Drive, hustling on the sidelines of welfare was serious business. Saving for the American dream was the immigrant's religion. The Lees, two doors down from us, ran a convenience store out of their one-car garage. The driveway of the Martinez house across the street hummed with the racket of their after-hours auto-repair business. Recent arrivals from Pueblo, Mexico, the Martinezes were in cahoots with the Lious, a Hong Kong Chinese family up the street, who turned their lawn into a used-car lot. Mrs. Nguyen next door took in tailoring work at night and ran a day-care center. Old Mrs. Chen, a Chinese-Vietnamese grandmother who lived with her children and collected social security, operated an underground catering business. Every day, she cooked dinner for some thirty neighbors who moonlighted at second jobs and didn't have time to fuss in the kitchen. Locke Drive was a busy place, a loud place, an industrious placeâif you knew where to look.
One of our white neighbors, Mr. Slocum, once asked Dad, “Why are you people killing yourself working around the clock like that?”
Dad replied, “How can you kill yourself when you are already in heaven?”
But Dad was realistic because his heaven was full of traps. While Mom made friends with her egg rolls and fried rice, and Dad was the friendly neighbor who lent his tools as readily as he lent his back, they were telling us: We're different. Never forget that we are different. You are better than they. You must study harder, work harder, and be better than they in every way.
Remember, Dad said, behind every company CEO is a gang of janitors and a hive of worker bees. Don't ever think America is yours. It isn't.
We plotted and we schemed and we dug our escape tunnel in humble silence. No one was to know. We would leave them all behind. Leave them with the dump and the drugs and the cops and the incarceration statistics. Locke Drive wasn't home, but a minefield we had to cross to get to the real America where we could live in comfort, in anonymity. Away from this noisy place dangerous with the occasional frustrated husband a little done in with liquor. Vicious with young punks strutting wild on the taste of easy drug money. Redolent with ethnic cooking, stinky with the offal of the entire city. We would escape. That was the mantra of our daily lives. We were so certain we were above it all. We never thought our family might not make it through this minefield without a casualty.
We escaped it every other Sunday. Government food stamps were neither amusement-park tickets nor movie passes, so Dad took the family to the beach. Mom bought baguettes and made pungent Vietnamese sandwiches with margarine, cilantro, pickled carrots, onions, cucumber, black pepper, chili pepper, and a squirt of soy sauce mixed with rice vinegarâa concoction that reeked to American noses. Traditionally, the sandwiches got fattened with pate and cured ham, but that was expensive, so Mom substituted with homemade Vietnamese bologna,
cha.
Our family of eight sardined into our ancient Malibu sedan with beach balls, badminton rackets, towels, and coolersâflea-market treasures. On the way over the Santa Cruz mountains, Dad pulled over at the midpoint to the summit to cool off the engine. We sat in the car watching the traffic whizzing by, our windows down, the car smelling oddly addictive with a mixture of mountain pine, car exhaust, and Mom's spicy sandwiches.
Hien and Kay fidgeted in the front seat between Mom and Dad. In the back, Chi and I both got window seats because we had seniority over Huy and Tien. The Malibu's radio didn't work so Dad and Mom did most of the talking. It was interesting to hear Dad talking to Mom or his brothers, but he always sounded stiff when he talked to us. We had question-answer sessions that sounded like a poorly written script.
Dad: “How are your classes going?”
Me: “Great, Dad. I'm getting straight A's. A-plus in math and science.”
Dad: “Are you still drawing?”
Me: “Not much. Just like you told me.”
Dad: “Good. Artists never make any money They always die poor. Huy, how about you, Son?”
Huy: “All A's except one B-plus, Dad.”
Dad: “Tien?”
Tien: “Two B-pluses, Dad, and four A's.”
Dad: “Hmm. You two should be more like your older brother. He has straight A's. I sacrifice so you can go to school. You must study hard and be the best.”
Dad rarely asked Chi anything. On these trips, she was silent, laying her head on the door frame, eyes fixed on the mountain pines blurring by. I didn't know her like I used to when we were playmates. Now, she was toeing adulthood. Chi wasn't attractive. Handsome, strong, perhaps, but never cute or feminine. Her coarse black hair, cropped close, limped hopelessly around her unhappy faceâ
flat and big like a cutting board,
kids used to tease her. Some kids inherited the good parts of their parents. Chi got all the unflattering features of hers.
At sixteen, she was as tall as Dad and much stronger. The beam of her shoulders matched any boy's her age. Every morning, she hammered through her routine of fifty push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, and twenty pull-ups without breaking a sweat. Trained in martial arts since age eleven, she held the equivalent of a black belt. Her chest was flat but thick and tight. And only I knew why. Chi bandaged her chest, like someone with broken ribs, to hide her breasts. She had been doing it since puberty. Once in Saigon when Chi and I went swimming at a public pool, we were both in bathing trunks. The pool owner yanked us out of the water and pointed at her nubby twelve-year-old bee stings.
Cover that up with a bra or I'll kick both of you out.
She didn't have a bra, so he booted us and kept our money. The other kids laughed at Chi as we gathered our clothes and shuffled out. The chest bandaging followed soon after that.
Unlike the rest of us, Chi hated these beach outings. Dad always took us to Carmel, a posh beach town of wealthy retirees and movie stars. He didn't have much of a choice. The first time Mom saw it, she exclaimed,
“Ooooo! So pretty. It's almost like Nha Trang.”
She repeated it
many times, smiling at the memories. As newlyweds, Mom and Dad had often vacationed in Nha Trang, commemorating their budget excursions with lots of pictures.
So Dad took her to Carmel without fail. As soon as he landed the troops on the sand, Mom trudged off with him in tow to take pictures of her sitting on dunes, footing the surf, and leaning against windcarved pines. We boys stripped to our shorts and charged into the waves and built sand castles. Chi stayed with baby Kay and the cooler. In 90-degree heat, she was clad in a pair of cutoff jeans and a dark T-shirt to hide her chest bandage. She didn't bring the bathing suit Mom bought her. No intention of ever wearing anything that betrayed the fact that she was a girl. When Mom and Dad returned, Chi grabbed a sandwich and an orange and vanished into the dunes. No one would see her until it was time to leave.
We picnicked out of brown paper bags, chomping on homemade sandwiches and drinking sodas in paper cups. It was not always a comfortable place. The good-looking peopleâtall blond folks of sandy, burnished skin, long legs, and jewel eyes, the localsâgave us a wide berth, and gave us the eye. Without being told, we boys knew, faces buried in smelly sandwiches, that we were playing in someone else's backyard.
Chi must have known her life would veer away from ours at some point. She must have stared at the dark ceilings for years, wondering what was wrong with her. Why was she so different? She must have known her unique orientation was in the eyes of her parents a perversion which they discounted as her troubling adolescence. She must have known the momentum of tradition would sunder her fragile world of secretsâher microcosm of one.
The first thing Chi did when we moved to California was throw away all her dresses and skirts. From her first day at high school, she wore men's clothing. Her teachers, misled by her confident male body language, instinctively classified her as a boy. One thing rearended another and suddenly it avalanched beyond her control. Whether she wanted it or not, Chi had a new identity. At school, she
was a he. And she used the boys' locker room and competed in boys' sports. She didn't speak much English then, but what friends she had were all boys. She was one of them.
Things had gone quietly for a year and a half on Locke Drive until she had a row with Dad. He knew about her chest-bandaging and he tried to teach her how to be a normal girl. Chi, mirroring her father's stubbornness, had sassed him. So Dad schooled his child, measuring out his love, in the way his father had taught him. He caned her.
How our lives became unhinged in those three days, I can't recall precisely. Some of it happened while I was in school, and my parents never talked about it. And we kids never had the audacity or the bluntness to ask them.
After we came to America, Dad didn't whip us as frequently. He heard it was frowned upon here, but once in a while, when the pressure to survive was great and we were less than exemplary, he lit into us. He was a good man but there was much of his father in him, the rigid traditionalist who espoused discipline, pride, and honor. These things gave him the right footprint to set off the mines of Locke Drive. It was the sort of predatory place that had evolved to break his sort of man. One way or another, the price had to be paid. No family made it through unscathed.