Other People's Lives (22 page)

Sut On looks around her and knows what she will never be: a lithe Annamese girl, pretty in an
ao dai.
Her bones are too broad, her legs are too heavy, and even if she ever put on an
ao dai
and got accustomed to the material, just above it her face would be a dead giveaway—she will always look Chinese. That's not what her grandfather has in mind, though.

“They have nothing,” he says, and will not even look at all the Vietnamese who crowd through the street. “No empire, no culture, no language, no energy. They couldn't even keep their alphabet, which in any case was really ours. What do they have that isn't borrowed?” and walking along in his long Mandarin coat and his beard, Sut On's grandfather does not dodge around trishaws or pedicabs, but passes right by them as if they were shadows and not there at all.

And soon they aren't: they have walked so far, Sut On and her grandfather, that by this time there are no more trishaws or bicycles, only Frenchmen in cars. Their eyes blink too much against the sunlight, their feet seem stuck as they push them, in big shoes, along the street.

“I've never told you this story before, Sut On,” her grandfather says. But she's in no mood for a story. No other street is so wide and so shiny, no other street has no markets or stalls. Instead, people walk in and out of glass-covered stores wearing the same kind of clothing that stares out from the glass. With their very pink faces, they climb to the top of high-windowed buildings, and when they get tired of being so high, they come down to the street, tip back in strange chairs, and, unfolding their newspapers, they sip cups of coffee and don't suck their gums. Not one of them knows enough to hold a cup with two hands, and despite this, they live in big white houses hidden by gardens, where maybe occasionally they take off their wide shoes. Even their little children have pink faces and red and yellow hair and, when they take rides on airplanes, do not come home to goats.

What story can have come to her grandfather's mind? Heng O, the Moon Lady? The Sisters in the Sun? How the Eight Old Ones Crossed the Sea? What on this street could make him think of any of them?

“A hunter went into the woods and in them found a young deer, a fawn so lovely that he could not kill her. Instead, he brought her back with him to his home, and let her play there within his yard. At first he worried that his dogs would attack the shy creature, so different from themselves. But it was not so. For months on end the fawn played and frolicked with the dogs in his yard, and grew up with them so well that the hunter saw no reason to return her to the forest. One day, however, when the gate to his yard was open, the deer ventured forth and, seeing some dogs in the distance, she scampered up to play with them. But these were strange dogs who had never seen a deer before. They tore her up from limb to limb and that is the end of her story. For so long a time had she lived with dogs, she no longer knew she was not one of them.”

“I've never even seen a fawn,” Sut On says, though she's never made this objection to stories about fox-fairies. But they're no longer on the Rue Catinat now, so she skips on the streets that are increasingly familiar, and her grandfather buys her a slice of pineapple.

“A deer is a fleet animal,” he says very carefully: it is Sut On who will go to the French school.

“Draw your own conclusions”

In French books the paper is very glossy. Touching it, in her European schoolgirl's smock, Sut On is no longer a girl who comes home each day to a room above a go-down in Cholon, or even a strangely pink-faced girl whose mother in thin, high-heeled shoes plays tennis at the
Cercle Sportif
and thinks nothing of walking in and out of shops on the Rue Catinat. Instead, she is someone named Françoise or perhaps Solange, whose face she cannot quite imagine, but whose feet take her along broad, tree-lined boulevards, broader than any in Saigon, and down into underground trains where people around her sit down politely with armfuls of long, thin breads. Sometimes this Françoise or Solange takes her small dog, Coco, for a walk into gardens called the Tuileries. She is totally unfamiliar with goats, though sometimes in August she and her family—mustached, firm-voiced father, smiling mother, and perhaps a small brother named Jean-Claude—take trips in a car which they own, past farms to the countryside. Here, there are animals, maybe even a goat, but Françoise or Solange occupies herself with the fruit orchards. She sings a song to herself in a perfect French accent about a shepherdess, all the while she is picking cherries and dropping them one, two, three into a basket. She is very careful to avoid picking any mushrooms, and when it is time for a meal, eats veal in a sauce of wine and butter, and potatoes that have been cut up thin and fried. Never in her life has she tasted bean curd, and if she saw a lichee nut, she wouldn't know what to do with it.

“She'll grow up to be a taxi-girl,” Ping shrieks whenever she sees Sut On in her smock, carrying home her school-books and writing out her lessons. It's the one thing Ping ever learned from Chinese literature: educated girls may bring great pleasure to men, even emperors, but never, never are they marriageable. Sut On's mother pays no attention to this, goes on pouring out her many cups of tea as usual, and worries only that her daughter, almost grown now, has become much too concerned with ordinary noises and everyday smells. Because of this, Ping has begun to call her Madame Oo-la-la, and still rails to Wu about his father, “How can he have shown such preference? He must have been as blind and deaf then as he is now.”

He's not truly deaf yet, Sut On's grandfather, but he is blind enough so that it's very difficult for him to read. Instead of taking walks together, Sut On reads to him from old issues of a Chinese newspaper whose office has been bombed. Luckily he cannot tell that these are articles which he's heard before, and is pleased enough with Sut On's blurry presence and the rising and falling of her voice as she reads. After his death, when his picture—taken so far back in his youth that Sut On does not even recognize him—is hanging on the ancestral altar, her mother says, “He was a very fair man, your grandfather. He had no illusions about his children.” What, in Sut On's opinion, was there to have illusions about?

There are things about her, though, which he has never known. First, her greatest mistake at the French school: a picture in drawing class. The drawing was in honor of Christmas, a feast day celebrating peacefulness and serene joy. Sut On drew a great-winged bird flying slowly from high mountains to a quiet pond. All around her, other children drew a fat, bearded man,
Père Noël,
or a pink, yellow-haired baby surrounded by donkeys. The French girls laughed aloud, the Vietnamese girls looked at each other and giggled, the drawing teacher tore up her paper. Sut On looked up at the drawing teacher: blond and doughy, his face looked like a countryside in a European child's picture book—the sheep on hills in French nursery rhymes. So, once again Sut On drew a picture for the joyful holiday—a pink, yellow-haired baby, and put him right next to a goat.

“Do you
live
in Cholon?” the French girls would ask her sometimes. “My parents like to go there to eat Chinese food. Do you walk all the way?”

Sut On walks all the way, she has never tired of it. No longer a small child on the arm of her grandfather, there are streets in Saigon she has gotten to know as well as Cholon. These days, though, there are almost no French girls left in her classes, and the Vietnamese girls who once giggled at her drawing hop into their brothers' sports cars, wearing sunglasses and giggling still. This time they're off to Vung Tau, to the seashore. Perhaps soon they'll go to Paris or even America. In the meantime they buy new scarves, look through
Paris-Match,
and watch the American secretaries whose hairdos, incredibly, rise up like so many new buildings: floors and floors of immovable, perfect curls.

Sut On will not go to Paris, nor to the university at Hue as she had wished. In the room above her uncle's go-down, cousins' children lie wailing on the floor, Lim sucks his gums with his cap on, the goat rings his bell in the yard. If she takes this teacup from her mother's hands, it will not rest between her fingers, but fling itself in all directions: like a dragon or one of the Forty-seven Beasts, there is nothing that it will not smash.

“A secret base in Cu Chi”

Narrator: “The village of Quoc Tri, once a place of cheer and hardy, joyous activity, found itself suddenly plunged, through no fault of its own, into one of lassitude and woe. No longer did the sultry winds whistle through the green and gold stalks a happy, continuous melody as busy as the chirping of crickets. It was not floods which were drowning the crops and sturdy spirits of the villagers, but great sheets of fire and flame, falling from the skies, which ruthlessly consumed, sparing nothing: neither fields, nor homes, nor sons. The villagers who remained could not contain their puzzlement. What had they done to so anger their ancestors? The women wept and wailed over the loss of those most dear, and the men, sunk in anger and sorrow, did not know what there was to be done, nor what, indeed, was the cause of this terrible misfortune. As they sat, still tormented by grief and astonishment, soldiers appeared amidst the ruins. From their speech and appearance, the villagers could ascertain that these soldiers were Southerners like themselves, and rushed out to greet them with hope innocent in their hearts. Alas! Neither hope nor innocence lasted beyond that instant. The soldiers, as rude and ruthless as the flames themselves, gave no heed to the cries of their countrymen. Cruelty flickered on their features and they swooped through the desolated village, ravishing its young daughters, torturing its revered Elders and temporary Chief. But still they had not contented themselves, for they began to vie with each other in wringing the necks of the few miserable, squawking chickens scratching mournfully about in the scorched yards. These they carried off to heavy rumbling trucks nearby, trucks whose massive sides were labeled U.S.A. And finally the villagers understood! These soldiers were the puppet troops of a usurper government, and the sheets of flame, the cause of their misfortune, did not fall from the skies, but were thrown upon them by giant planes flown from the country of Hollywood.”

What has happened to Françoise or Solange? And where, for that matter, is Sut On? Called Anh now, she is wearing black trousers still strange to her, and standing to the side, watching, as a small theatrical troupe performs a pageant for the villagers. It is an NLF holiday, so members from her base, which is close to the village, have come with the troupe to celebrate. It's not the first time she's been in a village like this one: years before, when Wu drove out to buy rice, Sut On and Chen occasionally went along. Chen would lope along with his father, but Sut On almost never got out of the car. Sitting in it, stuck to her seat by the heat and the sun, she would look out the windows, closed against mosquitoes, and staring at the red-tiled roofs behind small palm trees, at the little orchards of mangoes and jackfruits, and, above all, at a certain slow quietness so different from Cholon, she would wish that she was one of the small girls she could see running barefoot past the monkeys, sucking on a piece of cane or perhaps a coconut. She looks no more like them now than she did then: it's girls like these she's met at Cu Chi, girls to whose bodies black trousers are not strange, girls who have run barefoot for miles and miles through wild panther country and think nothing of it. Bits of rice and
nuoc-mam
are what they're used to, and jungle sounds at night do not make them jump. Their Vietnamese is so quick she can barely understand it. Naturally she is still not trusted.

The troupe is finishing up, waiting for the musicians. They sing with a guitar:

An American plane is like a tiger

Ferocious from afar

But helpless against determination!

Sut On is still watching a small-boned girl from the troupe, a dancer, who played out with slow, huddled movements the grief of a widow. The sadness, which just minutes before crept and bent through all of her, is gone now, transformed. She stands up straight and, in a plain cotton blouse her mother might have worn in the Viet Minh, is singing with all of them, “Helpless against determination!”

“Other women bring forth children, you bring forth rifles,” said the official who arrested Ho's sister in the days of the Viet Minh. Her father was a
lettré.
“My grandfather was a
lettré,
” says Sut On that night, when they are back at Cu Chi, far beneath foliage. In the darkness especially, the feeling of holiday persists: there are coconuts and an orange or two from the village, and some of the younger boys are strumming on guitars. But Sut On is impatient with it. In a headiness, an elation she cannot explain to herself, she pushes a guitar out of someone's hands, and in her high Chinese voice—she hears her accent but doesn't care—begins to sing:

Dors mon amour

Fais do-do mon trésor

On crie chez la voisine

Chez nous une câline

Tu se traines dans la fange

Tu vas dans la soie

Dans la robe d'un ange recalée pour toi.

The song is from
Mother Courage,
a record Sut On once found hidden behind books in the French school.

Dors mon amour

Fais do-do mon trésor

L'un repose en Pologne

Et l'autre je ne sais où.

“Why are you singing a French song?” says the cadre. He is a wiry man, quick, nimble, and for that reason called Squirrel. No one's name is his own.

Why is she singing a French song? For a second, in her headiness, Sut On thinks she will tell Squirrel about
Mother Courage,
about the Thirty Years' War, but is afraid that just like with machine-gun fire, when her head drums so quickly that the rounds seem too slow, her thoughts are going so quickly her voice would make no sense.