The Lotus and the Storm (33 page)

“You cannot decently just drop him,” I say, uncharacteristically bold. “Please, let's look for him,” I plead. I wish to be anchored by the specificity of a mission, of finding a familiar face in an unfamiliar country.

“He left,” Father replies. He does not react to my provocation. I think he sees Cliff as a friend who drifted away, as most ordinary people do when they are unable or unwilling to help but have no heart to stay and witness collapse.

“He could not help that. He was reassigned.” The original configuration of Father, Mother, and Cliff, with me hovering about them, was thwarted by precipitate forces bigger than any one of us.

Father flashes me a reproving glance but says nothing. He rejects my assumption of an affinity with Cliff. He looks at me intently and then arches his brow, a gesture meant to convey skepticism.

Our new surroundings are startlingly alien. There are spirals of oak leaves blowing in the wind, a chill in the night air suggestive of the temperate zone, the sharp scent of pine, and mounds of needle-type leaves shed by coniferous trees. The world here is devoid of coconut palms, bougainvilleas, frangipani blooms. Even though it is late spring or early summer, there is a pronounced incompleteness that is surely different from the full-bodied pungency of Saigon at this time of the year.

The camp seems immeasurably separated from a world teeming beyond our vision and grasp. Somewhere in the distance, I imagine a world of normal lives—a man standing on a ladder, in an ordinary neighborhood, hammering one cedar shingle, then another, onto a roof. Children going to school and returning home. Cars blaring horns.

One day an elderly woman stumbles from her bed and a red gush of liquid pours from her mouth. Is it the redness of betel nut chewed and spat or is it the horrible immediacy of real blood? Another day I play soccer with other children my age on a field of grass not much different from the field that was near our house. Afterward, we drink salted lemonade. We sit on aluminum lawn chairs and watch the purple gloaming vanish behind the pitched-tent roofs that for now define the horizon. Through all this Father is almost always with me. He sticks to the activities, the routines, as if somehow they will help us cloak our shortcomings and inoculate us against this feeling of shame. He is exhausted but his body is straight. At night, on his army-issued bed next to mine, he sits, back erect, right foot over left thigh, left foot over right thigh, his entire body fitted and clasped as if it were one self-contained column inside the tight grip of meditation and sadness. He has changed. He wants to know where I am every minute even though I am almost seventeen.

He must sense that I am not really here. He must sense that nothing really catches and holds for me.

The only thing that sticks are the night walks I take by myself on the lighted trails that meander through the camp. I linger just enough to see beguiling movements and silhouettes through the lit openings of the tents. I discover that I like solitary evenings when the sun's last glide takes it to some other corner of the earth and darkness slowly envelops us in its tinctured sheen and deep-colored light. It is as if a much beloved song were played, but in an altered pitch—in the minor key or dropped an octave. The notes are the same, but the mood is inverted.

One evening I walk around the sinuous bend of road that hugs a distant part of the camp. I am slightly off the path and my feet sink in the bare earth. Wisps of grass and wild creepers brush my ankles. There is a strange comfort to this. And then suddenly I stop. No more than two meters away is a large black cricket sitting in front of me, as if to block my way. He stares at me, holding my eyes for several minutes. I squat and put out my hand toward him. I feel the brush of his antennas against my skin. He puts out a loud calling song, thrumming and rubbing his wings, tilting his head. The serenade haunts. And then it abruptly stops. He hops across the tracks and disappears into the bleak wonder of a soft, purple mist. Above us, a dying star shines.

Everything else is a blur, blasphemously so, perhaps. Surely whatever is happening inside this camp is important, the bullhorn announcements, the interrogative voices, the notices about who among us has found a willing sponsor outside these encampments. No one here can leave without receiving an offer from an American pledging responsibility for his well-being. All of us here will soon be scattered across the United States. Father is anxious for us to leave so I can start school at the beginning of the school year. A woman points to a map and shows her son where their sponsors live. There it is, the city, a compact dot representing a new destiny.

Ngo Quyen Street and the tamarind trees along its edges, the garden path behind our house, the soccer field where James performed dribbling feats, the profusion of mimosa plants among the cluster of bushes and trees my sister and I hid behind, the first inward turning of their leaves when they are touched. I see and feel all these and more as a continuing presence, a waking consciousness, their being, their reason, their somethingness, palpable and within reach even if their physical manifestation is not. That they have vanished is what has given my imagination its proper sense of wonder and awe. Try as I often do to push it all back, just to reassure Father of my well-being and normality, it will not concede. It is there, now a crumbling presence, but I know I will covet it in perpetuity. “It.” It is everything. It is always there, in the center, without edges.

 • • • 

Soon things move with superstitious dread at an even greater speed. I see the shadows of our new life coming at us. Something is emerging at last from all those forms and questions and answers. After six months in the camp, Father has found us a sponsor who will for one year be responsible for our housing and food and Father's job and my schooling. It is one of the many Catholic churches in Virginia.

He delivers the news with intuitive grace, as an anecdote to accompany his simple gift, a pack of Wrigley's gum. He mouths the words “We are leaving.” I am simultaneously skeptical and curious. So we are sponsored, our future officially stamped and processed.

After a bus ride and a plane ride, we are in Virginia. A priest and a nun greet us. We are provided with a four-room apartment, all laid out in a line, each room spilling into the next without corridors. From the front door, there is the kitchen, then a bedroom (mine) and another bedroom (Father's) and a bathroom. To get to the bathroom one has to walk through his bedroom and to get to the kitchen one has to walk through mine.

Within six months, Father and I find jobs and we partially wean ourselves off the church's charity. We stay in the apartment owned by the church and pay a discounted rent. Within the year, we move out so that another refugee family can move in. During the day Father cleans a bowling alley. I am home from school by the time he returns and I make a point of greeting him with great solicitude. In the evening, he writes about the “lessons of Vietnam” for a research center that is part of the American military. I clean but I am not a cleaning person, he says softly. It is something he does but it is not who he is. I too clean—the shelves and floors of a Vietnamese-owned grocery store, one of two already established on Wilson Boulevard by the pre-1975 Vietnamese, those who are in the United States for reasons having nothing to do with the loss of our country. The owners are friends of Father's acquaintances and allow me to work there when Father pleads our case to them.

A few months into our new Virginia life, I again wonder out loud where Cliff is. At dinner I ask my father the question. I touch his hand for emphasis but he disowns my touch. He recites his well-rehearsed reassurances. “Everything passes. We will be all right. We don't need help.” He means to console yet I am strangely disquieted. A part of me wonders if Father was ever grateful to Cliff for the companionship he provided Mother after catastrophe struck, which freed Father from the burden of being solely responsible for her daily well-being.

I remind him that Cliff is his friend. Father turns pensive and nods, more to himself than to me. “True,” he says. “But people change.” He stands up, goes to brew a cup of tea, and sips it. I suspect there is more to his formidable resistance. Perhaps he is too proud to have Cliff see us in this condition. Knowing he has disappointed me, he makes a point of holding me tightly.

I remain silent but allow myself to be pressed against him. Still, what I mind most is the slyness of his reticence, the dissimulation of any interest or curiosity about Cliff.

“Remember what I told you and your sister when you were little? Be careful whom you trust.”

I am startled. It is one of the few times he has mentioned my sister since her death. We turn quiet, facing each other, not together but not apart, just silent between thoughts, each intent on protecting the other by keeping our small despairs to ourselves.

This is the structure of my new life. I enrolled in school two months after the school year began. In the morning a school bus takes me from my house to school. To give me an additional year in high school, Father falsified my age, marking me down as fifteen and enrolling me in the tenth grade. I am small in size so no one suspects. We have no official documents such as birth certificates to produce so anything can be invented. Our father does not allow himself to demonstrate much in the way of emotions, but I know he has many worries. He fears that I will have no friends or, worse, that I will be mistreated in school because I am new and all the students have been through the lower grades together. But I assure him I am unruffled by school and I am relieved when I do in fact experience these words as the truth.

Despite the romanticized view of what it means to become Americanized, I see through it all too well. The molecular makeup of the melting pot is three parts mundane and only one part visionary. The fakery of assimilation itself is tame and, worse, tedious. Father finds it hard to believe when I tell him that school is easy or that its very ordinariness will not be difficult to manage. I am newly invented, a persona practicing my will and focusing my powers of attention on high school English, history, math, biology. Most are two grade levels easier than what I studied in Saigon. And so I am here, persistent and competent and capable of producing the top grades that will make Father happy. I take care to study in school and at home.

I hone the brain's dull organ of logic and exhibit a credulous acceptance of all that is required to make the transition into Americanness. I understand its allure and can make a show of turning myself over to it when I am in school.

My heart remains elsewhere. Perhaps Bao has it, staking all her being on it. I struggle to keep it all separate. I strive to leave my memories scattered behind so the transition can be efficiently managed. Once, I might have reminisced, but now I strive not to. The curtain falls, an iron curtain, separating my heart from my head.

In the evenings, Father and I sit together at our round table and pass the time. Neither of us has ever cooked before but over time Father has learned to produce a modulated heat, just right and not a flicker more, that simmers the stew and allows the pork to linger in its clay pot. I hear the sound of a spoon going round and round in a pan. Sometimes we allow ourselves to be surrounded by the brilliant distractions of television.

I do my homework at the kitchen table. Father pushes a Hershey's Kiss on top of my notebook. He gets chocolate candy from the bowling alley and brings it home. He puts one foil-wrapped chocolate on the table for me, then, when I am done, another. And another.

He turns from the stove and says to me, “Any of your friends live nearby?” looking for an entry into the time I spend away from him.

I set down my pen and align it in the groove of my spiral notebook. “No,” I say. “They are in a different neighborhood.” He nods, seemingly reassured. He assumes they are in their own houses doing their homework as I am in mine. Here, in this new country, he feels relief and anxiety in equal proportions.

I do not tell him that I am stalked by Bao and Cecile and that I exhaust myself managing them and keeping them from escaping into the public world. I do not tell him about the math teacher who excoriated me when I questioned the grade I received on a test. The hardened face. The speech about “you people” delivered with pointed finger while I sat stilled and muted. I do not tell him that I am sometimes seized by a churning sensation that makes me vomit.

Instead, I tell him about the wonders of school because he so believes in the radiating, transforming power of education. I assure him that I am entering into a world of prodigious knowledge. Everything comes out almost as a debriefing. For him there is a comfort in the reiteration of my day, as if here is finally a shift to the essentials, a formal aesthetics that matters at last. I find at least one element of the day to share with him. I tell him about isosceles and equilateral triangles, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I practice words like
hypotenuse
. Father listens attentively.

The daily format of my school day and its coherence soothes. I have geometry first period, English literature second period, social studies third period, then lunch, and so forth. There is one tabulated point, then another one, that punctuates the day. Everything about school becomes material for his plainsong celebrating the refugee's hope that the child will have a better future than the parent.

If it were not for my constant fear that Bao will catapult out and cause me to lose time, my school obligations, the subject matters themselves, would be but a balm. So far she has not trespassed into the world of my school. So for now, my classes are manageable. They allow me to pivot into the present while looking toward the future and boxing away the past. Boxing it the way I try to box Bao, mentally inside a metal enclosure guarded by ferocious animals pictured on its metal lid.

I suspect that Father's work is also, for him, a circumvention of a disquiet that must lie underneath us both. I think it is the persistence of absence that we both feel.