Love Like Hate (23 page)

D
isillusioned with Vietnamese Buddhism, Sky had lingered in Saigon for the cheap rent, food, beer and other earthly amenities. His one objective in life was to stay away from America and, by extension, the West. It was a real bitch to be born into a continent-sized country, Sky believed. A huge country was like a vast, monolithic prison: You were shut off from the rest of the world and didn’t even know it. Sky had also lived in India, after hearing on the BBC about a French guru who ran an ashram in Tamil Nadu and walked around naked all day. Leaving Chennai, he endured several cramped and clamorous bus rides to finally arrive at the ashram’s gate. He stayed for two weeks meditating, reading, gardening and cleaning the toilets. He found no peace, just a lot of hard work. Sky left because he didn’t want to substitute one system for another. He didn’t care for Shiva or Jesus or any other god. Life, he decided, would be one drawn-out improvisation for as long as his stamina held up, like a late Coltrane solo, wild and beautiful and always on the verge of disintegration. Sky was, however, open to the possibility of becoming a buddha and that was why he came to Vietnam. In Saigon, he discovered something akin to pure chaos. In India there had been a confusing jumble of deities to be worshipped, but at least the people knew the names of their gods. The average Vietnamese, on the other hand, had no idea whom he was praying to. Every temple was referred to colloquially as Master’s or Mistress’s Temple. Sky even saw Vietnamese
Buddhists praying in Hindu temples in downtown Saigon. In Tay Ninh they worshipped a mysterious Black Lady, in Bac Lieu they supplicated rocks. Putting their hands together, they closed their eyes, bowed repeatedly while mumbling to stone statues of tigers and dogs. Everything seemed wide open—doors, windows, mouths, genitals—without making sense. It was anarchy. Sky saw a funeral procession led by a marching band jamming Dixieland—“When the Saints Go Marching In”—complete with a drum
majorette
who kept dropping
his
baton, while a traditional quintet brought up the rear, playing mournful music. Separated only by the ornate hearse, the two strains mixed with the theatrical weeping and the beep-beeping of a thousand irritated motorists. It was anarchy. Yet this was partly an illusion, of course, because a country’s strictness and mores are often invisible to an outsider. One’s first impression of any society, even the most rigid, is often of freedom.

Sky applied for a job at the New York School and was hired immediately after only a cursory interview. Being much taller than his students, he felt very benevolent toward them. Because of his bad teeth, the students and their teacher had at least one thing in common. Sky was disturbed by their materialism, however, and their lack of social consciousness. He noticed that many of them wore designer clothes and rode expensive motorbikes, while thousands of beggars roamed the streets. All the students talked about was brand names and pop music. They thought of America as a vast shopping mall to be envied and emulated. While he searched for a Stone Age Eden, they were trying to crash the twenty-first century.
They’ll never get there
, Sky reflected with more sadness than malice.
Poor innocents, they don’t realize that all of humanity is about to reverse gear and roll backward down the oily slope of progress. The twenty-first will come to resemble the seventeenth before they know it. Rushing to become modern, these people have swapped their vegetable patches, carp ponds, pigs and geese for a fake pair of Levi’s, but the futuristic future they’re fantasizing about will be nothing more than a last puff of smoke discharged from the rusty pipe of an exhausted lemon
.

To his students, however, Sky became an instant mascot for the very progress he had no faith in. Ignoring his nose ring, dreadlocks and body odor, they anointed him a harbinger of the future simply because he was a tall white American. To be American is to be huge in every sense, but Sky was sick of all things colossal. He wanted everything smaller, and more handmade. Sky often had a few beers with some of his students after class. He favored the humble sidewalk cafés over the expat bars. He also preferred Vietnamese pop music, where tune after dreary tune were strung along by pathetic, dispirited singers. Music should always be homegrown, to reflect homegrown emotions, Sky reasoned. A surfer should listen to surfing music, a caveman his cave music. Reggae playing at the South Pole would destroy both reggae and the South Pole. Music, just like food, should always be consumed in situ. Sky hadn’t had a single French fry since arriving in Saigon. No Coke or Pepsi either, only soya milk and Saigon beer. Coke should not be allowed outside the city limits of Atlanta. Sitting on a low stool to dispense his wisdom, Sky fancied himself a reverse missionary, there to warn the natives against conversion. It wasn’t at all contradictory for an English teacher to steer his students away from Anglo culture, he reasoned. They would never master English, no matter how hard they tried. Agents of bad English, they’d bring down the empire. Thinking they were speaking English, they’d only be parodying and perverting it. They were like a virus running rampant inside the decadent English body. There was no vaccine and it was too late for a quarantine. As soon as they opened their mouths, these annihilators of English infected native speakers with their horrific pronunciations, spellings and grammar. With amusement, Sky often found himself babbling like a retard, just to be understood by his so-called students. Drugged by Hollywood films and armed with electronic dictionaries, these students were no more than assassins of English. As for that rarest of foreigners, countable on one hand, more likely one finger, who was capable of beavering forward in a
passable English, all they were doing was injecting weird, foreign ideas into the Anglo mind, making it less Anglo. In sum, the corrosive influence of billions of bad English speakers will make the language unrecognizable and irrelevant.

Take Latin: Even after being dead for fifteen hundred years, Latin-based words continued to be sloshed and gargled by billions of unclean mouths around the world. First thing in the morning, people wake up to defaecatus on what’s left of Latin. Instead of cruising up and down the Mediterranean, the Romans should have stayed in Rome to hoard and protect their culture. They should have barricaded themselves inside the Coliseum and built no roads, walls, aqueducts and amphitheaters all over the place. They shouldn’t have driven the bodacious Boudicca berserk by birching her. If they hadn’t colonized England, France and Spain, etc., Latin would not be buggered daily by the Nigels, Jean-Pierres and Julios of the world. A language can only maintain its integrity by being exclusive, shut to outsiders, such as the Native American Ahtena (eighty speakers), or, better yet, the Argentine Ona (three speakers). By cajoling the rest of the world into learning English, Americans are begging for their own death. Nodding in the direction of the many beggars surrounding them, Sky stated that, yes, the United States also had beggars. “I was practically a beggar when I lived in New York.”

“Why didn’t you get a job?” Hoa asked him.

“I did have a job, I was a bike messenger. I delivered packages to offices, but I didn’t make much money. I slept in a closet in a house I shared with five people.”

“A closet?”

“It’s a tiny room built into the wall to store clothes.” Sky had forgotten that Vietnamese homes don’t have closets. He was sitting so low, his knees grew level with his chest. A neon tube strapped to a nearby tamarind tree tinted his face an icy blue. Brown tamarind pods, toothpicks and soiled tissues lay scattered around his leather sandals.

“Why didn’t you live with your parents?” another student asked him.

“I was seventeen when I left my parents. Americans do not live with their parents. If you’re still living with your parents past your eighteenth birthday, you’re considered a big loser!”

The students were astonished by this statement. Many of them, especially the men, would live with their parents for their entire lives—until death.

“I love my parents, sort of, but I don’t want to live according to their rules,” Sky continued. “If you don’t live under the same roof with them, they can’t tell you jack shit! Jack shit means ‘anything,’ by the way. But you need a strategy to survive as a poor person. Always buy the cheapest pasta, for example. It doesn’t matter what shape it is: fettuccine, linguine, capellini, it’s all semolina in your stomach. And you must cut out the bullshit. You don’t need Gucci, Polo, Ralph Lauren or Nike to survive. I stay away from brand names on principle. The only purpose of advertising is to make you hate yourself, so you have to run out of the house to buy a Fila shirt or a bottle of Eau Sauvage to slather all over your face, only to make you slap yourself repeatedly!” Sky noticed a student wearing an ersatz Izod. “That doesn’t count. It’s fake!

“Live simply,” Sky advised. “Besides my nose ring, which I bought for a dollar at the Dollar Store, I own no jewelry. I always buy my jeans at Kmart, the worst store in America.” To prove he wasn’t kidding, Sky stood up and pointed to the upside-down Vs on his back pockets. “You must remember that Kmart jeans are 50 percent polyester, 50 percent cotton,” he added cryptically, losing his train of thought. Unlike dialogue in a well-plotted novel, his conversations flaunted their countless loose ends, which could never be cleaned up by an editor.

As he drank more Saigon beer, Sky talked faster, using slang almost exclusively. “I never pig out on fast food because these joints are owned by corporate pigs who run small farmers out of business.
Thanks to Ronald McDonald, there won’t be any Old-McDonald farms left in the US of A. No more forty acres and a mule, bluegrass or square dancing. I shit you not, my friends: These motherfuckers torture cows and chickens just so they can stuff you with their poisoned meat! They make cows eat cows and chicken shit, chickens eat cow shit, and feed the sheep corn syrup and aspartame.

“And the music!” Sky continued after a brief beer pause. “American pop music is just one endless come-on. Just one unending advertisement!”

“What’s a come-on?” Hoa asked.

“A come-on is when you bring your face really close to somebody’s, like this,” Sky brought his mug to within an inch of Hoa’s, “so you can screw her later!”

“What’s ‘screw’?”

“Make love! Have sex! Take advantage of, you know, bang!”

“I still don’t understand. The music wants to screw you later?”

“Yes, the music is just an advertisement!”

“But what is it advertising?”

“America!”

If he was really trashed, Sky talked in aphorisms. “I own nothing therefore I own everything. I don’t buy art because the Louvre, the Uffizi and the Prado are already mine. I buy no land because I am the lord of every country.”

At first, Hoa always stayed after class to hear Sky talk. She thought he was cool and sort of cute. Remembering his face so close to hers, she’d actually get shamelessly aroused and imagine licking the tip of his oddly shaped, obscenely forward nose, even swallowing it. But then she got tired of his ranting. She decided it was just drunken bullshit.

3
ACRID-SMELLING BLOOD

T
here is a twelve-hour difference between New York and Saigon. At 9:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, as Sky was sitting on the sidewalk with a group of students, images of the first tower burning appeared on TV. “Your city!” someone shouted. “Your city is burning!” Joining the others in front of the tube, Sky felt shocked and awed. He noticed among the concerned, outraged faces, plenty that glowed with glee. The most horrible things, he soon realized, are mere spectacle to an outsider. Everything becomes entertainment, unless it’s your hide that’s burning. The only other times he had seen Vietnamese so excited in front of the TV were during soccer matches. Half expecting a comically violent reaction, everyone looked at Sky with pity and amusement. A student said, “Even your disasters are like Hollywood.” Sky remembered watching
The Towering Inferno
as a kid, and how much he had loved it, especially the part when O. J. saved the cat.

Living on Staten Island, Sky had approached the rigidly inspiring World Trade Center with dread each morning—just seeing those white towers meant that he was going to work. Each evening, he turned his back to them with dazed relief. On the ferry home, he would think while passing the Statue of Liberty,
I’m free, free at last!
But to watch the towers go down in two monstrous clouds of dust among the aroused foreign faces in that bright café made him feel that something in him had crumbled forever. Although he could not articulate it at the time, Sky sensed that the American story of righteous
dominance, a narrative that he had always railed against, had finally ended. The giant had allowed himself to be castrated, his twin cocks severed by two knives ablaze. Incoherently and with a changed voice, he would have a hard time convincing the world that he was still invincible.

That same day, Hoang Long was at home in Archbold, Ohio. As bin Laden’s benign face came on the TV screen, he thought immediately of another thin-whiskered man who had lived in a cave and been a determined enemy of America. Ho Chi Minh was the first bin Laden, and bin Laden was just another Vietcong. As guerrilla leaders, they had benefited from the largesse of the CIA or the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA.
If I were President Bush
, Hoang Long thought with genuine anger,
I’d make them pay for this outrage! If you have the best army in the world, you ought to use it. Kill them all, let God sort them out later!
Living in the heart of the empire, Hoang Long felt strangely vulnerable and humiliated. He was grateful to America for having brought him to the promised land and given him an honest living with plenty of growth potential. There was no dignity but in labor. He had risen from janitor to chicken packer to chicken zapper to chicken terminator. Foremanship was next. If he wasn’t already old, and his bones didn’t ache so much from working overtime, he would gladly repay this debt by fighting in America’s next several wars, starting with the War on Terror. Wherever there were terrorists, extremists, turbaned minutemen, deadeners, etc., and lots of hydrocarbon under the sand, by the way, he’d volunteer to kick down doors, overturn mattresses, spray righteousness and squash the (non-Monsanto) seed of terror. Kill ’em all, let the Red Crescent sort ’em out. He finished his can of Budweiser, then immediately popped open another one because he was so upset.