The Lotus and the Storm (3 page)

On television, the undulating green of a rice field grabs my attention. I can almost taste the succulence of a blade of rice, green and sharp, against my tongue. Pagoda roofs slope with architectural deliberateness against the Saigon skyline. Above, a helicopter hovers. Conical hats ruminate, bowing toward black earth covered by a shimmering liquid green. I reach for the remote control and raise the volume notch by notch. Tanks roll, truckloads of soldiers hop into chaos, voices emerge brittle with anxiety and sorrow. The number of dead is chronicled, one by one. How quickly they are counted. A precise tabulation of American dead, American wounded.

Scraps and remnants of glistening green present themselves to me, from a distance. Many layers of forests, thickly canopied. I can see the earth where death is interred. The scarred trees, the dark shades of green that spill over from branch to branch, as each overgrown layer fights off vines and tendrils in search of sunlight, space, and growth.

I take a deep breath and look again, though I wish to forestall insurgent introspection. Over and over, newscasters recall Vietnam from the American consciousness.

Quagmire.

Now stretches of monochromatic orange and brown desert sand tremble in the sun's haze. Desert towns are besieged against a drifting landscape of sand and sloping plateaus. I hear of continuing fights in embattled cities along the Euphrates. Basra. Nasiriyah. Najaf. In the background, outside the focus of the camera's lens, a cactus blooms amid the sunburned sagebrush. I see the crumbled sections of mosques, the traveling dust storms, the treacherous movement of shadows against gentle date palms. There is no assurance of order here in this self-canceling landscape where sand obliterates sand. Everything now occurs
here,
the way it occurred
there
so many years ago. A disputed town is controlled by a clutch of government soldiers one day, unofficial militias of one religious sect or another the next. A soldier's body is found floating in the Euphrates. Armies slip across borders, attack, and retreat. I think of Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Vientiane, Laos. I might have been echoing them in my sleep.

The names that once ignited high passion have changed, but the ends of the earth were once found there, as if they had been there forever.

I lie still as she takes my hand and places it on her knee. I know what she is doing but my mind is on the screen. I take in a deep breath and hold it inside me before letting it out. I can feel the squeaky lungs bucking and rebelling. But still, after a few minutes I manage to find a rhythm of alternating inhalation and exhalation. The body still hurts and disobeys but I am learning to ignore it. I can move on. I look into Mai's face. She starts with my baby finger and clips her way to the thumb. The clippers make crisp, snappy sounds, sending the jagged edges of my nails flying. As I slip back into the slow pulse of that place from long ago, I hear the tart scraping sounds of the broom against the floor. It must be a Vietnamese broom by the full throaty contact it makes on tile. The rice straws, bundled and bound together by vines, scrape and scratch. I feel a tear run down my cheek. I listen to the sweeping motions, left to right, left to right. My nails are being recovered and swept into a dustpan.

A television announcer asks about exit strategies, that pernicious little phrase. I know the calamity of being this country's ally. The unleashing of warring factions, of fire and chaos, and then the declaration of victory. The escalating cost is proving to be too much—too much blood, too much treasury, all adding up to a pointless generosity. I can see politicians in Washington, D.C., preening for the next news cycle. How can they be blamed! They didn't know things would turn out like
this.
I watch what is going on as someone who was born in a poor country. I see how they swing the wrecking ball. I know how the weak country has to wheedle.

With each successive moment they are deeper into the very war from which they wish to exit. It is familiar, a shadowed history that stalks and does not recede.

It has been more than thirty years since Vietnam fell. But 1975 is still here, held to enormous scale inside me.

It is now 2006. The year hardly matters. Why would it be different now? They continue to cartwheel from one disposable country to the next, saving the masses and abandoning them.

Mai has returned to my bedside and wipes my face with a washcloth. She does not seem to mind my occasional lapses; she has her own phantoms and demons. I know that she makes private but regular sojourns to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I know that under her neatly folded shirts are pamphlets and booklets about the history, conception, and construction of this haunting structure. Once, I happened upon her stash when I folded the laundry. The mere photograph of it on a book's glossy cover tugged at my heart. Two black triangular granite walls coming together to form a V, sunken belowground like a scar in the earth. Names of American dead are etched row by row on its shiny surface. A diamond next to the name means the person was killed; a cross means the person is missing.

Mai props me up and plumps several cushions behind my back. She has become the keepsake of my memory. “Tell me,” she says. And inevitably, I do.

It is 1963 and I am back in Saigon—the suffocating haze of heat. One day before the coup.

It was late afternoon and I had awoken from a long nap. I thought of nothing, not of motives or consequences, and that itself was of enormous consolation and satisfaction. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, a calm beige. There was a lightness in my body, an abiding sense of possibility, merely because for that singular moment I hoped for nothing. Perhaps the lightness would stay. But at the very moment I wished for it to remain, the feeling collapsed inside me. The door opened and a sliver of half-light entered the room. My wife slipped into bed and positioned her head on my chest. I whispered, “Em, darling. Quy.” She breathed softly into my neck. Her hair floated, its long soft strands brushing against my face. She wore loose clothing that flowed. The cotton fabric was so thin I could almost feel the full nakedness of her body pressed against mine. Ours was an old-fashioned courtship that continued right through the domesticity of marriage. Her mouth rested on the nape of my neck; her skin settled into mine. I shifted her body and allowed my palm to ride the length of her back. I closed my eyes. If only I were a painter, I'd have been able to capture her form and essence with a few brushstrokes, a fluid line here, another there.

My wife pulled me closer. She hummed the slow, cantabile passage from Chopin's
Fantaisie-Impromptu
. We were surrounded in each other's warmth. I exhaled. A feeling of contentment worked its way slowly into my being, the same feeling that had entered me when I first walked alone with my wife not long after we met. I hoped for nothing; I was already certain that we would spend our lives together. All around us was a vast rice field, the single point of access into the country's soul. I loved its opalescence, rich earth redolent of harvest; the froth and swell that churned and roiled when the monsoon swept through the country, draining off years of accumulated wrongs and faithlessness.

The first time I kissed her as we stood by that field had surprised us both. She tasted faintly of sugar. I did not quite know what love would feel like, but in that moment, I believed I understood everything. Something moved inside me. “Anh,” she had said, softly. “My love.” Her voice was polished, like a stone rubbed smooth by a river's flow.

“I have never kissed before,” she whispered. She called my name. “Minh.”

Right through my heart surged a thrill so fierce it made me desire not consummation but restraint. I wanted to prolong the moment. I wanted to fall to my knees in complete surrender.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-two.”

She hesitated. “I am not yet twenty.”

I said nothing.

She drew herself closer to me, her face against my shirt. She too was holding back, leaning against me, but not quite. Her breath danced against my skin. I felt the
ping ping ping
of my nerves dancing up and down my spine.

I would not reveal any of this to her. I knew these protesting facts—the ways of old Vietnam. Status mattered and I had none. I was an errant son from a distant land. My parents were Vietnamese but made their living as shopkeepers in Vientiane, Laos, where I was born. I was only traveling through Vietnam, panning for gold in the tributaries of the Mekong River.

Still, over the course of weeks, months, she convinced me that we would find our way into the world by love's intuition alone, the way each day inevitably followed the next. We hung on to this belief, even when her parents disapproved of the marriage and disowned her.

If I could be granted one wish, it would be this: to go back to that time when I first fell in love by the rice fields. I would return to the place I had left and it would still be there, waiting. Just as my wife would be. There, among a profusion of green, in a flowing purple
ao dai
.

 • • • 

How did a small, skinny country clinging to the coast of the South China Sea attract the attention of a great power?

I see the cursed geography of Vietnam. A conquered country cleaved into two halves, the northern half under Ho Chi Minh and the southern under Ngo Dinh Diem. The differences between the two were stark. The North was tightly clasped inside the iron-clad scaffold of the Communist Party. The South was a loose archipelago of centrifugal impulses, each spilling away from the center, each seething with its particular desires, fractious babble, and fierce passion.

Our efforts to forge a national identity out of the South's divisions were opposed by a tangle of local, religious, and secular interests. President Diem himself was impeded by his own police and secret service, all of whom had split loyalties. From the Hoa Hao to the Cao Dai to the Binh Xuyen sects, each commanding its own sprawling army, from the biggest to the smallest landlords, from the French to the Chinese monopolists with coffers of silver and gold, everyone had something to fear from the president's ambition for a strong, centralized national government. And everyone in this group did what could be done to sabotage this dreaded possibility. The rest simply waited.

Saigon in 1963 was battered down by factional rivalries and conspiratorial politics. It was a city driven by appetites, afflicted with vertigo. Plots were recklessly hatched. A common desire ran through the city, to charge and push outward, to enlarge the sphere of influence.

One November day, our collective fate would be redirected. After that, everything faltered and changed.

 • • • 

I was in a government-issued jeep driving to the military headquarters. The streets of Cholon, sloped and tilted, were slicked with spilled diesel. Still, as if to defy, trucks, cars, motorcycles, assaulted the concrete landscape. Here, in this traffic, was where the highest level of gamesmanship would be played out. Everyone believed he had right-of-way and no one yielded to anyone. Drivers turned their steering wheels wherever they needed to go and blasted their horns.

My jeep was stuck among ox-drawn carts, construction trucks, cars, and bicycles. This section of the road was under repair and traffic converged into one lane. Everyone was heading home for the afternoon nap or lunch. High school girls floated in their virgin-white
ao dais
. The acrid smell of diesel and tar lingered in the air, trapped in the earth's steam. My eyes smarted from the sting of smoke. A persistent sourness like the odor of damp laundry lifted from the street. It had rained and a certain unpleasant moistness remained trapped inside the black asphalt. Vendors thrust wedges of green, unripe mangoes toward me, their sourness to be tempered by chili-spiced salt wrapped in plastic. I bought a glass of sweet jelly grass cubes mixed with syrup and hand-shaved ice. The midday sun hovered fiercely above, suspended against the bruised sky. On the sidewalks shoeshine boys squatted, running their rags over rows of military boots just like mine. Perhaps it was the military boots that triggered it; suddenly I could feel it, the way you could feel your throat tighten and your heart clutch when you sense the beginnings of danger.

I drove the jeep onto the main boulevard of Saigon, heading toward the Presidential Palace. I had received the order to attend a routine meeting at the Officers' Club in the General Staff headquarters. Such meetings were necessary to maintain an esprit de corps among the president's officers.

During those chaotic, troubled times, forthrightness was neither prudent nor desirable. People presented impassive faces and learned to produce oblique answers that were ambiguous enough to satisfy the country's many competing factions. But I was not a political man and, unfortunately for me, saw only what was right before my eyes, not what was brewing underneath.

Months before, I had watched as flags were hoisted along the major streets of Saigon. The mood was celebratory. Multitudes were expected to gather for the Buddha's birthday. Against the indigo sky the flags luffed and billowed. I noted with some trepidation that all the flags were Buddhist flags and not one was the national flag of three red horizontal stripes against a background of yellow. It was a fact worthy of observation because the government had ordered that religious flags could be flown only in temples or churches and political flags only in political headquarters. The government had decreed that national flags must be bigger in size and hoisted above all other flags. We were trying to forge a common identity and a sense of duty to the nation, after all.