Love Like Hate (12 page)

“It’s a long story. I joined the army. I fought and almost died several times. In any case, there’s no more Saigon so let’s not talk about it. Let’s just forget the past. Open the door so I can come in!”

Over dinner, Sen was told by his wife that the Vietcong had taken over Vinh Chau five days earlier. His family had escaped by boat apparently. During the war, the ARVN controlled little of Vinh Chau beyond the post office—it was more or less VC country.

Sen stayed home for seven days. On his first night, yearning for Kim Lan, he decided to give sex with his wife another try. It was really Kim Lan, beautiful, glorious Kim Lan, who lay under, over and next to him in the dark, the scent of coconut oil and rapid, breathless Chinese emanating from his suddenly excitable wife notwithstanding. Sen had a thing for Vietnamese women. It wasn’t because they were any more beautiful than Chinese females, he simply wanted them more because they were off-limits to him. If two women looked exactly the same but one was labeled Vietnamese and one Chinese, he would pick the Vietnamese one. It enraged him to think that such a good-looking, qualified dude as he was could be deterred from having sex with some hot Vietnamese chick by the vigilant alpha, beta and gamma males of Vietnamese society. He was determined to change this unnatural natural law. On the eighth day, he silently exited the house before dawn, got on his bicycle and pedaled away. He would never see Vinh Chau again.

Sen reached the ferry landing in the late afternoon and was astonished to see his car still parked on the other side. The hicks had
been too intimidated or honest to mess with it.
This is a great omen
, he thought. Inserting the key into the ignition, Sen became so giddy he actually burst into song. As he drove away, the hicks could clearly hear him singing in English, “I got you, babe!”

Kim Lan was giving Cun a bath at the back of the house when she heard someone rattling her steel gate and calling her name over and over. She knew who it was immediately because she had been thinking about him for over a week. Still she thought,
It cannot be him
. When she opened the steel gate and saw Sen standing there, smiling as usual, she pretended not to be shocked and happy. “What are you doing here, Sen?!”

“I came back because of you.”

“I thought you had left by boat.”

“How could I leave without you?”

12
JAR GAMES

F
rom 1975 to 1986, Saigon went through a dark age. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent off to concentration or labor camps. Food shortages became a fact of life. Rice, cooking oil, salt, sugar and MSG were rationed. Yam was served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Letters sent from overseas were often lost and packages stolen. Wine was made by fermenting the cores of pineapples. Jackfruit pits were boiled, peeled and eaten. Love songs, known as yellow music, were banned under penalty of imprisonment. Trinh Cong Son, Vietnam’s greatest songwriter, was sent to mine-strewn fields to plant cassava. Monks and priests disappeared, to be replaced by phony monks and priests. Nearly everyone was hungry nearly all the time. There were blackouts twenty-one days out of the month and water pressure plummeted. Yellow sorghum, a rice substitute, got stuck in everyone’s decaying teeth. Toothpaste became scarce and laundry detergent was used as shampoo. Head lice multiplied, leading to shorter haircuts, even among women. Fresh milk disappeared and condensed milk became a luxury item. Anything could be stolen by anyone at any moment. There was nothing to read and nothing to watch on television. Everyone conspired to escape by boat, but only a few succeeded. Among the boat people were former supporters of the National Liberation Front, now contrite and yearning for America.

One needed connections and careful planning to escape by boat. But above all, one needed money. To buy a place on a boat, one had
to pay about a thousand bucks, not a small sum in a bankrupt country. Some people tried a dozen times without success. Many made it to international water only to die of thirst, starvation or by drowning. The ones who headed toward Thailand—the land of smiles in tourist brochures—were often robbed and raped by Thai pirates. Neighbors who don’t speak the same language rarely make good friends. After arriving in a refugee camp, the boat people had to wait for years to go to a third country. Many were eventually sent back to Vietnam. The ones who persisted, those who had to get out at any cost, were often the best of South Vietnamese society: doctors, lawyers, engineers and intellectuals. Most Chinese merchants were also hounded into leaving. Though less radical than its former protégé, the Khmer Rouge, the Hanoi regime was still systematically destroying an entire society. An enduring legacy of this period is a deep yearning in the Vietnamese psyche to leave Vietnam at the first opportunity. Birds, bees and salmon do it, but the average Vietnamese can only dream of crossing a border.

The only people who did well through this time were the bribe-taking government officials and police. They took bribes for everything, even for allowing a boat full of refugees to set out to sea. People would pay one set of officials to leave the country, only to be captured and thrown into jail by another set of officials.

Kim Lan could not keep her café open because of the government ban on private businesses. She sold all her jewelry and Sen sold his car. They learned how to survive on the black market by selling fish sauce and laundry detergent. Each evening she went to the market to buy the leftover, nearly spoiled chunks of fish to make a very salty fish sauce. There was hardly any fish in her sauce but her customers never complained because they couldn’t afford anything better.
Have rice, eat rice, have broth, eat broth
, goes a saying. Starved, even a phoenix will eat chicken shit.

Ignoring the government monopoly on laundry detergent, Sen learned how to make his own and sold it in plastic bags with counterfeit
labels. Sen had never worked before, but now he had no choice. Kim Lan marveled at her new husband’s industry. She never would have suspected that he could spend at least twelve hours a day making detergent. Before, he only crawled from bed at nine or ten, but now he rose at the break of dawn, as the cocks crowed. (Even now, you can hear cocks crowing in Saigon. Chickens are kept two or three to a cage before they are slaughtered.) Sen’s productive years would prove to be an aberration, however. As soon as hard times eased up, he reverted to chess.

So many houses were broken into around this time, Sen had to buy a roll of razor wire and uncoil it on the roof. Ubiquitous during the war, like tanks and sandbags, barbed wire is an American invention. The devil’s rope was originally designed to keep cows from roaming, Indians from encroaching, and the cowboys from singing their lonesome ballads. At night, Sen slept with a knife, Kim Lan with a flashlight to shine at the source of any trouble. Through this nightmarish period, they embraced and comforted each other. He proved to be an ideal husband and an excellent father for Cun. Kim Lan kept a photo of Hoang Long on the altar and lit incense sticks in his memory, but she rarely thought about him. He did show up in her dreams a few times. Once, she heard her name called, turned around, and saw Hoang Long standing there, his body maimed and bloody, his face reproachful, and the sight panicked her into screaming. Waking up, her eyes wet, she was grateful to see Sen still next to her. She would look at Sen and think,
I finally have a real husband, someone who is faithful and tender, not a man who ignores his own son, makes love like a brute and takes off his wedding ring to run off with some mistress
.

About the only thing Kim Lan disliked about Sen was his table manners. She had always considered the Chinese a vulgar people who even farted as they ate. The first few times Sen did it, she ignored it, but once she became so enraged she had to scream, “Why don’t you go fart on your father’s grave?!” Sucker punched by this outburst, Sen spat a mouthful of yam (fart) all over the table (fart). To
be fair to Sen, it was well known that yams cause the stomach to boil (fart). Even Kim Lan farted steadily as she ate, chewing with her mouth wide open, but she did it very quietly so no one could hear. With superhuman effort, Sen willed himself to stop farting at the table, but he couldn’t stop eating fried fish with his hands, forsaking chopsticks, while spitting little fish bones onto the floor. After each meal, he ran to the back door to hack his copious phlegm into the alley. “It’s good for my health,” he explained.

During this period, Cun often came home from school dirty, dried mud in his hair, his clothes stained, with scrapes on his arms and knees.

“What happened to you?” Kim Lan would ask, though she already knew.

“I got into a fight. I smacked the other kid pretty good, too. I bloodied his nose.”

“How many times have I told you not to fight with other kids?”

“He said, ‘Your father sucked American dicks.’ I had no choice. I had to fight him.”

Cun hadn’t bloodied anybody’s nose. He was one of those kids other boys practiced their punches and kicks on. They tripped, elbowed and kneed him in the hallways, pushed him down stairs and spilled ink on his notebook. Loving to fight, they needed no pretext. During recess, they divided into gangs to hone their skills at injuring and humiliating each other, to feel the thrill of fist against face. Cun stayed out of these rumbles, but he couldn’t dodge the after-school ambushes. There were days when he was too frightened to go to class.

During this period, there was a rash of deaths involving young children. Because of the low hydraulic pressure, people had to buy large jars to store water inside their houses. Kids liked to stand on chairs to look at their reflections inside these jars. They also liked the echoes of their own voices talking or singing that the jars produced. Playing these jar games, many kids ended up falling headfirst into the jars and drowning.

13
PARIS BY NIGHT

F
acing economic disaster, the government allowed people to resume petty capitalism in 1986. Reopening her café, Kim Lan renamed it Paris by Night. That year she also had her second child, a baby girl. Hung Vuong Hospital was much dirtier than before, run-down, its equipment American leftovers from the war, its filthy hallways crowded with relatives of patients. Many people had come from the countryside because rural hospitals were in even worse shape. The nurses and doctors made so little that you had to tip them constantly if you expected them to perform their duties. Even traffic-accident victims were left to die if the medical staff wasn’t tipped on time. Sen didn’t want to take any chances. He tipped all those involved with his daughter’s delivery twice the going rate. To Sen and Kim Lan, this daughter embodied all of their hopes for the future. They named her Hoa, which means both “flower” and “Chinese.”

Business at the café was going extremely well, allowing Kim Lan and Sen to hire a servant to take care of the baby. They decided on A-Muoi, a Chinese-Vietnamese woman in her midforties. Sen had insisted on a Chinese babysitter so Hoa could hear and learn Chinese from the beginning. “You and your Chinese Chinese!” Kim Lan jeered at her husband before relenting. As always, she picked the ugliest domestic servant available. She preferred the bucktoothed, cross-eyed and level-chested. That way her man wouldn’t be tempted to pounce on them in the middle of the night. That way
they wouldn’t disappear into a karaoke bar. She would have picked them old, but the old ones didn’t work as hard. A-Muoi was as homely as they came. Plump, splayfooted and dragging a pair of pink plastic slippers around, she had a sullen, sweating face with a double-wide mouth filled with way too many teeth, none matching, in at least a dozen improbable colors. As she worked, she mumbled half-swallowed snippets of an ongoing soliloquy of self-pitying complaints. “Work, work, work,” she would huff. As long as she never winked at Sen, Kim Lan was happy.

Cun was fifteen by now. He was listless and did badly in school. He hated history class because he didn’t want to hear about how his father was a lackey for the bloodthirsty Americans. He cringed at photos of the My Lai massacre, like everybody else, but dismissed the story behind them as Communist propaganda.
They probably killed those people themselves
. He hated literature class because he couldn’t stand having to memorize Ho Chi Minh’s poems. He hated just sitting in a classroom because Ho’s face was always smiling at him from high up on the wall. Above Ho’s portrait was the slogan
ALWAYS REMEMBER YOUR DEBT TO THE GREAT UNCLE HO
.