Love Like Hate (14 page)

The café was not Kim Lan’s only source of income. She also lent money at 20 percent interest a month, a rather mild, humane rate, much less than the 50 percent charged by some. It was still a messy and ugly business. Kim Lan only lent to people she knew well. That year she bought a motorbike—a Honda Dream, the latest and most expensive model—and hired another servant. As always, Saigon was awash with girls from the countryside trying to find work as domestic servants. Kim Lan didn’t have much to do but go food shopping in the morning then look after the till the rest of the day. Those two tasks could not be assigned to servants because she didn’t
trust them with her money. She also didn’t trust them to pick the right groceries at the market. The merchants had so many tricks to fool the unsuspecting shopper. They rubbed blood under fish gills and turmeric on chicken to make them appear freshly killed. They sold cotton pods as black peppers and buffalo meat as beef. Further, a servant could not be expected to fritter away her brief span on this earth by shrewdly, intensely haggling with someone else’s money.

In her free moments, Kim Lan played with Hoa. Hoa was everything Cun was not: a beautiful, alert child who radiated intelligence. She was open to the world and easy to feed, unlike Cun, who still refused many foods even as a teenager. Hoa could be amused by the simplest things: a large leaf, the rain, geckos on the wall. She laughed constantly and danced whenever she heard music.

On Hoa’s first birthday, Kim Lan placed a pen, a ruler, a set of keys, money, a lump of clay, scissors, a mirror, a ball of sticky rice and a pack of playing cards in a basket for her daughter to choose. If Hoa chose the scissors, for example, she would grow up to be a seamstress; the playing cards, she would be addicted to gambling. Leaning over the basket and nearly falling into it, Hoa took a long time deciding before picking up the lump of clay, meaning she would mature into a mud-smeared peasant. Some parents would have spun this into an indication that their child would own land or become a real estate agent. Unhappy with the peasant prognosis, Kim Lan cheated and allowed her daughter a second dip. This time Hoa plucked the keys from the pile, meaning she would become a businesswoman.
She’ll buy and sell and make lots of money
, Kim Lan smiled.
She’ll take good care of me in my old age
.

15
DEAREST WIFE

January 5, 1988

My Dearest Wife
,

I miss you and Cun very much. Don’t despair! I know how difficult life must be for you now, but you must fight to keep your composure and be patient. Don’t worry about me too much. I think about you every second of every day and am only kept alive by the thought that I will be able to hug you and kiss you again one day. If not for this happy dream, I would have already killed myself. Saigon seems like a dream, but I know I will survive this ordeal to one day see it again. They told me the train is running every day now and in fact some of the other prisoners have already received visits from their loved ones. If you can afford it you must come to see me immediately. Buy a third-class ticket, it is not expensive, and please bring me the following items, if you can afford them:

Vitamin pills

Cold medicine

Malaria pills

Toothpaste

Toothbrush

Paper and pens

Soap

Detergent

Underwear—only briefs, not boxer shorts! Briefs will keep my testicles from sagging, as I do hard labor
.

Sesame salt

A thick blanket

Sweaters—make sure they’re long sleeved. It’s very cold here
.

A knit cap

A raincoat

Dried fish

Shredded pork

Tea

Coffee—to be drunk only on special occasions
.

Cigarettes—the best kind, to bribe the wardens
.

Bandages

Nail clippers

Powdered soybean

Sugar

Instant noodles—I can even eat these raw when I’m out in the fields doing hard labor
.

Red-grained rice—it’s more nutritious than regular rice
.

Bread—cut the bread into slices, dry them in the sun, then place them in plastic bags. I can steam the bread later. I’ll eat the bread for breakfast. It’s easier and quicker to prepare than cooking up a pot of rice
.

Ginger—so I can drink it with tea, to keep from getting a cold
.

Pork stew

Toilet paper

Sandals

Slippers

Socks—very thick. It’s very cold here
.

Pajamas

Slacks

Dried banana

Dried onions

Dried garlic—to keep from getting a cold
.

Dried chili peppers—to keep warm in winter
.

Black peppers

Cookies

Candied fruits

Soy sauce

Fish sauce

Fresh cabbage

Please bring all these things to me as soon as you can. Don’t leave anything out. I’d not have listed any item if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Please know that I think of you night and day. Soon I will be able to come home and we can start our lives together again. In fact, it will be better than before because I won’t have to go off to war. I will be able to stay home with you all the time. Do not lose heart
.

Being here has allowed me to reflect on many things. I realize that I haven’t always been an ideal husband. I promise I will make it up to you when I return. I love you very much, Kim Lan
.

Your husband
,

Hoang Long

Ha Nam Ninh Reeducation Camp

Ha Nam Province

16
UNEXPLAINED PORK STEW

W
hile Kim Lan read Hoang Long’s letter, Sen sat at his usual table. He had just sacrificed a rook and a knight to corner his opponent’s queen. Focused on this imminent triumph, he never noticed his wife’s agonized face. As usual, the poets were arguing and Khanh Ly was singing Trinh Cong Son’s lyrics:

The very next day, Kim Lan went out to buy all the items on Hoang Long’s list. It took her two days to finish shopping. So as not to arouse Sen’s suspicion, she kept everything at a neighbor’s house. She also went downtown to buy two round-trip train tickets to Hanoi, first class, two sleeping berths to a compartment. Knowing she would have to spend forty-eight hours on the train each way, she didn’t want to risk sleeping with strangers in a six-berth compartment, not with all the valuable things she had to bring her husband. The most precious was a tight wad of money stuffed into a plastic pouch, then inserted into a stinking jar of fermented shrimp paste. No warden would stick his fingers into fermented shrimp paste, she reasoned, to search for contraband. She didn’t
forget to dry the sliced bread and stew a potful of pork, with extra salt so it would keep longer. When everything was ready to go, Kim Lan announced to Sen that she and Cun had to go to Phan Thiet for an aunt’s funeral. They would be gone for eight days because she needed to catch up with her relatives in the Phan Thiet area. Sen had seen Kim Lan make that pork stew, which he never got to eat.
Now why would my wife take pork stew to a funeral?

17
IF JACK KEROUAC WERE VIETNAMESE

T
here was little passenger train travel in the North and South during the war. The railways were constantly sabotaged by all sides during that long conflict, with practically all the bridges and tunnels bombed or blown up at one time or another. Kim Lan and Cun hefted their two bags onto the train, then entered a small cubicle that would be their home for the next forty-eight hours. They discovered a tiny oscillating fan bolted onto the ceiling, a table folding neatly into the wall, and a sink inside a cabinet. When Cun turned the tap, water actually came out. The relative luxuries of a first-class compartment made them giddy and took the edge off their mission. Neither one had been on a train before. Feeling strangely relieved, they were only vaguely conscious that this lightness came from having idleness forced upon them. For the next two days they would have to make no decisions.

The train lurched along with a tremendous racket, but the service was fine. Not expecting meals with their tickets, they were pleasantly surprised to be fed three times a day: rice with stewed pork, deep-fried tofu, vegetables, noodle soups and fruit. Each compartment had its own thermos, tea pot and cups. The view out the window was blocked by a screen mesh. The conductor explained that children had been throwing rocks at train windows. The screen mesh also kept thieves from climbing in at the stations. As if to
frighten them further, he told them that sometimes thieves rode on top of the train, waiting for an opportunity to snatch a watch or a necklace through an open window. “In short,” he scowled, “don’t open that screen mesh!”

Feeling dizzy from the train’s motions, Cun untwisted a jar of Tiger Balm and rubbed the ointment on his temples and under his nose. Breathing in deeply the scents of cajeput, camphor, mint and menthol, he leaned back and stared through the screen mesh at billboards, rice paddies, buffaloes, peasants, shacks and schoolgirls in
ao dais
riding home on their bicycles. Soon he got tired of it. Climbing to the top bunk to lie down, he noticed a book lying facedown in a corner. His first instinct was to throw it away or burn it, but then he saw a bikinied beauty on its shiny cover. He opened the book, hoping to find more half-nude women. The language was foreign to him, but then all language was foreign to him. Looking over Cun’s bony shoulder, we can see that it’s a Lonesome Globe
Guide to Vietnam
, first edition, 1987. Let’s read a sample page:
Vietnam is a thin, long country, with the railroad serving as its spine. One either goes up or down, with little interior to explore. If Jack Kerouac were Vietnamese, he would have had more or less one road to wander. The lush green mountains are populated by tribes, with the Vietnamese confined mostly to the coast. With such a long, lovely coastline, one would assume that the Vietnamese are a great seafaring people, but the sea has yielded only anchovies and foreign invasions, and there have been no Vietnamese explorers, only a few world-class wanderers like Ho Chi Minh. Fearful of discoveries, timid and sluggish, the Vietnamese dare not scour the earth to spread their ceramics, coins and semen. While other peoples sing of the open road, write picaresque novels and make road movies, Vietnamese sing of going home, although most of them have never left home in the first place. A Vietnamese can feel homesick in the very house he was born in. Just look at the one sitting next to you, for example. He’s already homesick, ten minutes into his first train ride. Leaving home is depicted in songs and popular literature as a grave misfortune, a curse that happens only under duress, never an opportunity. But the
aftermath of the Vietnam War, and not the war itself, has finally scattered Vietnamese across the globe, forcing a people loath to emigrate into relocating to majestic, pristine Norway or exciting Israel … one can even get a decent spring roll nowadays in exotic Vladivostok or sunny Ajaccio. (See our catalog for the most reliable guidebooks to these marvelous destinations.) To Vietnamese overseas, the Fall of Saigon is a black day in their history, marked by a solemn ceremony every year. (Inside the country, some people have also inverted the term
giai phong—
meaning “liberation,” as in “the liberation of Saigon”—into
phong giai,
meaning having your crotch burned.) Yet even after living in California for thirty years, for example, Vietnamese still sigh about being homesick, although most of them are so Americanized they would never go back to Vietnam to live. Most of them are so Californian they would never leave California. The country that many Vietnamese long for is a kitsch, mythical Vietnam of smiling peasants, gentle mothers, and flute-playing boys perched on water buffaloes. Perhaps an idealized, Platonic Vietnam, however poorly imagined, is a necessary mental anchor because the country itself is constantly being deformed, reformed and disintegrated. Steered against their will, hijacked, Vietnamese speak often of having lost their country
.