If You Lived Here (15 page)

A storm made the waves crash against the boat, causing people to scream in terror, to throw up until there was nothing left inside. I don’t remember feeling fear myself. I had only one thought on my mind: I had to have Khoi. Most minutes of most days, I was completely absorbed by the effort of getting on top of him. My hand was a scavenger, a rat racing down his pants to grab him. At two or three in the morning, he would finally give in. Then, for as long as he would let me, I pushed myself onto him, up and down, up and down. His body sustained me. When he eventually pushed me away, I screamed that I would die without it. The old ladies on the boat called me “whore.” The men called me “cunt.” The younger women turned their eyes away.

Once, when the storm passed, Khoi led me up the ladder to the deck. “You always wanted to see the ocean,” he said. “Come up. It’s so beautiful.” But the bright sun assaulted me. I held my hands over my eyes and screamed that I couldn’t breathe. Finally, the captain told Khoi to either take me down or toss me over. Back inside the dark bowels of the ship,

I took great deep gulps of the rancid air, sucking it down like a nursing baby.

The storm had blown the boat off course, and after we ran out of fuel we drifted. The first mate measured rations with an empty can of condensed milk: Each person got one can of rice per day, and double that in water. Khoi mixed two cans of fresh water with an equal amount of sea-water and used that to cook our rice. He fed it to me with his fingers, and when I gagged and spit it out, he picked the grains of rice off my chest and fed them to me again. He joked that he’d discovered a new recipe for fish sauce and that when we got to America he’d sell it and make us thousands of dollars. He didn’t know that people in America don’t eat fish sauce.

After six days, a Swedish tanker spotted the boat and towed it to Hong Kong. A bus carried us from the port to the refugee camp, where I lay on a bed in a Red Cross hospital, a needle stuck in each arm. The nurses were foreigners. None of them could speak Vietnamese and, whenever the translator, a guy from Saigon, came through, I asked him to strangle me. Everyone thought I was crazy, and they became even more convinced of it when stories of my behavior on the boat began to circulate. My craziness must have appealed to the foreign nurses, though. They brought me treats—pink ribbons, a shirt with a drawing of the Eiffel Tower on it, chocolates I refused to eat. Sometimes, the small blond nurse from Belgium would sit by my bed and play international pop songs on a hand-held tape recorder. The music soothed me. One morning I found myself gripping the Belgian nurse’s hand. Another afternoon, while the Belgian nurse was rewinding the cassette, I wept. She must have held me in her arms until I fell asleep. Later, when dinner arrived, I tried to eat it.

The day that the needles came out of my arms, I slept the whole afternoon. When I woke, I lay with my eyes closed. I could hear the voice of the translator.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. His words were kind and hesitant, lacking the brusque efficiency he usually used in his job. “And she was an only child?”

I heard Khoi’s voice. “Yes,” he said. “Only that one perfect little girl.”

The truth, even from Khoi, made me shudder, but hearing it relieved me in the way that vomiting relieved my nausea. Then I thought: The Belgian nurse must know. And the Belgian nurse had hugged me. For one fine moment, I was able to breathe again.

The translator asked another question. “Do you two plan to have another child?”

I stopped breathing. “We don’t know,” Khoi said. His voice sounded sad, convincing. “The medical system killed her. We knew we’d never have another baby if we stayed in Vietnam.”

In my mind I saw My Hoa then, her face full of joy and anticipation. What did she want from me? A piece of cake? A silly song? A story? I screamed. The air flooded in through my nostrils and down my throat, causing me to choke and flail in the bed. Someone held me, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Khoi.

“You piece of trash,” I whispered. “Dirty dog. Liar. Murderer.”

He winced, but his voice was steady when he answered. “I may be wrong,” he said. “But I’m doing my best. Please. Just try to understand.”

I stopped struggling and we stared at each other for a long time. When he finally loosened his grip, I pulled myself up and spat at him.

Somehow, Khoi and I managed to make something resembling a life in San Francisco. It so closely resembled a life, in fact, that after some years I had to leave it. That’s when I moved to Wilmington. For a while, Khoi used to send me packages every month or so, gifts that he hoped would entice me to return: postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge, Ghirardelli chocolates, cable car key chains. These were not the things he loved about the place. They were the things that he, as an immigrant, knew had made the city famous. But I never cared about San Francisco as a city, and so, after a few months, he shifted his strategy and started sending items I couldn’t get in North Carolina: candied ginger, water rose apple tea, nos-talgic poetry by expatriate writers. None of it tempted me because those were the very things that had driven me away. I didn’t want those reminders of my previous existence. I didn’t want to be part of a Vietnamese community. I wanted the sparkly anonymity of America. If I could have separated myself from Vietnam completely, I might have done so, but I had to make some kind of living, and running a market is the only thing I know how to do here. I said as much once to Khoi on the phone, and not so long ago, either. He continues to get upset over the idea that all I do is work to earn money. He reminds me that I had planned to study literature. One night, he said, “You had such great hopes for yourself.”

Had he completely forgotten that he once expected to become a famous architect? “Well,” I retorted, “so did you.”

Whenever we hit a standoff like that one, we get off the phone as quickly as possible. That’s the problem that Khoi and I always have with each other, even though I haven’t seen him in years. No matter what we’re talking about, we always hit a point of despair. We end up talking about things we don’t want to talk about anymore, so we hang up the phone just to keep ourselves from upsetting each other.

But, a month or two later, one of us will try again.

A couple of days after Shelley and I cook
bún thang,
Khoi calls. “How are you?” he asks, without even a hello. His voice is affectionate. He never identifies himself, never has to.

“I’m okay,” I tell him. “How are you?” I’m under the covers, watching German ballet on PBS. I switch the TV off and ease my head back into the pillow.

Khoi and I never make small talk, but it always takes a while, when months have passed, to figure out where to start. After a moment, he sighs, “I’m so tired all the time.”

“Did you open the new store?”

“Yeah. I can’t even keep the stuff on the shelves,” he says, without enthusiasm. Khoi is rich. Two decades ago, back in Vietnam, our families would have been shocked to hear that this sweet, shy architecture student would found a chain of Asian supermarkets and become one of the wealthiest Vietnamese in America. But, from the moment we arrived in this country, he has sweated and saved to make it here. For

six years, I sweated and saved along with him. Then, the day we opened our first Lotus Superstore in the Richmond district of San Francisco, I decided to leave. Khoi tried to convince me to change my mind, but he knew that I was stubborn. “Where will you go?” he asked. In one of the local Vietnamese papers I’d seen an ad for an Asian grocery for sale in Wilmington, North Carolina. I showed it to Khoi. “There,” I said.

Now, fifteen years later, he still complains that I abandoned him. “If you were here, it would be better,” he says.

I don’t really take him seriously, though. Such musings are just his way of saying that he misses me. I understand, because I miss him, too. It’s not love, exactly. No, maybe it is love, but it’s not romantic. Many years ago, I left my ability to be romantic beneath a tree in Unification Park in Hanoi. Khoi retained a bit—he got married, didn’t he?—but, even when he talks about Thuy, his wife, I can sense his emptiness.

“I’m better off where I am,” I tell him, as always. “You’re better off, too.” Then I change the subject. “How’s Gordon?”

His voice becomes lighter at the mention of his son. “He’s in the San Francisco Boys’ Chorus. He’s only the second Vietnamese ever admitted.”

I calculate in my head. “He’s seven now?”

“Right. Our only problem is that he refuses to speak Vietnamese. Sometimes we ignore him when he uses English, but he stomps out of the room, yelling that he’s not going to talk in our fake language anymore.”

“Well, he’s American. Don’t push him.”

“I have to.” I can hear the resignation in his voice. “It’s his culture.” “I guess.” My gaze settles on Hannah Ellis’s portrait of my mother.

I’ve set up an altar on my dresser, and I light incense for her every morning now. But I have nothing for My Hoa, still.

He says, “I have to tell you something.”

I wish I could remember my mother’s last words. “What?” “I’m taking Gordon to Hanoi.”

I close my eyes, push myself under the covers. A dark cocoon. “Did you hear me? Hanoi?”

I should have expected it. I’ve always considered my departure from

my homeland to be a permanent break, like cutting the flower before it wilts on the stem. But now people keep returning. Even Gladys—who calls the Communists “red devils”—is talking about starting an import/ export trade in cheap shoes. She can go back and stay there if she likes. I don’t care. But with Khoi, I care. Khoi knows where my house is.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I won’t do anything to hurt you.”

I imagine Khoi and his son, sitting on those creaky wooden chairs in his parents’ home on Tran Hung Dao Street. The whole family will squeeze together around the tiny table, drinking tea, admiring the little American prince. And friends and neighbors will file through in packs, wanting to hear what happened. For years they’ve thought that Khoi and I were dead.

“Everyone will hear you’re home, Khoi,” I say. You could never keep a secret in Hanoi. People always joked that this crowded city was really just a tiny village. “People will ask.”

He admits it. “It’s true. I have to do it, though. For Gordon.”

“I know.” My voice is a quiet murmur. I don’t even have to speak. Khoi would have gone back to Vietnam years ago, if not for me. But still, I’d give anything to keep him away forever.

“I’ve been thinking about something.” “Don’t even say it.”

“Just let me go and talk to them. You never know. It’s been over twenty years. People forgive.”

“Stay away from them.”

“I leave on May twenty-fifth. At noon. Call me if you change your mind.”

“Right.” I have to get off the phone. “It’s late, Khoi. I get up at six.” “Think about it. The twenty-fifth, okay? All you need to do is call.” “Okay,” I tell him, but I won’t, and he knows it.

My mother believed that destiny affected everything—war, death, illness, fortune, even the choice of tomatoes at the market. When I got sick

and missed the Communist Youth outing to Do Son Beach, she had no sympathy for my misfortune. “It’s fate,” she told me. “Don’t go moan-ing about something you were never meant to do.” Her lack of sympathy pained me, but her logic upset me even more. It was the summer of 1975. Vietnam had driven out the American imperialist aggressors and become the envy of the world. My teachers told us that a modern country had no place for superstition. We needed to have clear minds, like Uncle Ho’s. But my mother acted like someone living in the stone age. She said, “It’s your destiny, child. Don’t go near water.”

I didn’t believe her then. I believe her now.

You can’t avoid your destiny. I learned, in the worst possible way, that I should stay away from water. And I’ve learned, since then, to notice signs. Like noticing the ad in the paper for the Good Luck Asian Grocery on the very day we opened Lotus Superstore in San Francisco. And Shelley. She’s a sign. These days, she comes to cook with me two, sometimes three days a week. She brings books, lists of questions, photographs of Hanoi, and while we stand there making my lunches, we talk. In my mind, I call these mornings
v
e
quê,
going home. Khoi has his way, I have mine.

I haven’t figured out how Shelley is mixed in with my destiny. But

here’s a sign: She shows up unexpectedly at the very hour that Khoi flies out of San Francisco, on his way to Vietnam.

I’m standing in the back of my store with two old-lady customers. One of them, with dyed blond hair and heavy gold jewelry, scowls at the nutritional information on a bag of preserved turnip. “Is it meat?” she asks me.

Her friend, a leathery-faced woman with a little pixie haircut, jumps in. “Connie, it’s a vegetable. Remember?
Turnip
. Like, turnip greens?”

Connie eyes it suspiciously. “Looks like meat to me.”

I lean against the refrigerator. Connie and her friend are having a “Thai” dinner party and have asked me for help. They think I’m Thai. Fine. They can think I’m from Kenya if they like.

“This turnip real good in the pad thai,” I offer. They page through their
Delights of the Orient
cookbook.

The bell at the front of the store jingles. I have a glimpse of Shelley’s red head at the front door, then she disappears down an aisle before bursting around a corner to reappear in produce. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Out in California, Khoi’s plane is taking off.

“Mai!” Shelley gasps before the sight of my customers stops her. When they fail to notice her, she points to herself, then to me, then holds up an envelope. “I need to talk to you,” she mouths the words. I nod and tip my head toward the kitchen. Looking grateful to have a task, she turns and strides away, her hair like a flame tearing down an empty road.

Fifteen minutes later, after dispatching the Thai dinner, I duck into my kitchen. Shelley already has the tea ready. She hands me a mug and says, “There’s another delay.” Then she unfolds two pieces of paper and spreads them on the counter. “I made them fax me the original so I could show you.”