The Lotus and the Storm (39 page)

As I am reading Uncle Number Two's letter, I am alternating between quietly crying and vehemently denying the truth I know is coming. I can't bear to go on reading. I feel my father's tremulous hand on my shoulder. He has been standing behind me, reading as well. We might have howled but we don't. Instead we collapse into silence.

MR. MINH, 2006

I
am here looking out the window. The sky is powdery blue. The ripe, creaturely facts of spring are not yet evident. I wait for that time of the year, not yet here, when trees explode in white petals and the smell of newly cut grass blows through half-open windows. I wait for that extravagant show of the earth's annual renewal. But for now, I am content with the more subtle, incipient signs of spring, like the robin I glimpsed on a tree branch yesterday.

Life itself seems to hum with a steady purpose that is disrupted only by Phong's fleshly presence. His reappearance, even if brief and limited, has magnified feelings I thought had been quieted. Now, after Mrs. An ushered him out, I am left here with an inner tightening in my stomach, light-headed with vertigo, but able to see everything with perfect clarity. The varnished wood, the sallow walls, the long, immaculate hallways. The self-deceiving friendship.

I am keenly aware that time is passing. I see myself and I see my child, sometimes as Mai, sometimes as Bao, and sometimes as both at the same time, if that is possible. It doesn't matter who is out and who is in during these visits. There are ghosts inside each of them. They both have devotions to a world that lives somewhere among the headstones, that floats somewhere under the waters of the South China Sea.

The letter is still here in my bedside drawers. I take it out and touch it. I see how it has been altered by continual handling. I remember when I first read it years ago, and when I later reread it with Mai and Bao by my side.

Mrs. An is moving about, her heels making successive clicks against the floor. She hovers nearby when she senses trouble. She is aware of my two daughters, Mai and Bao. She knows instinctively, without my having to explain much, that Bao's existence is derived from Mai's pain. Over the years, both she and I have grown accustomed to the surreal transitions that characterize their combined lives.

Mrs. An takes my hand and asks, “Are you okay?” She knows I am stoked up by Phong's presence and burdened by my worries about the intimately crosshatched well-being of Mai and Bao. Once again my lungs are filled with fluid. To prevent me from choking on liquid, she sprinkles thickening powder into a bowl of soup for me to sip.

Here is the letter again. I am beset by a ravenous hunger for air. Breathe, breathe, I tell myself. I feel a throbbing in my temples.

A terrible knowledge entered years ago and here it remains, formidable, unflinching.

I lie here keeping a ceaseless watch over her.

In my dream my wife and my daughter are still alive, their profiles paired in silhouette. I see her eyes, her lips, her neck. My wife, resplendent in purple, smiles. The house is aglow in the evening's lambent light.

I look at the letter as if her sacrifices, so many, can be felt and understood through a careful examination of Phong's handwriting. It is as clear to me now as it was when I first read the letter. We, Phong and I, her brother, all of us, have been the helpless and infirm ones in need of rescue. My wife was our source of endurance all along.

A lesser insight has kept me from seeing this truth earlier.

“We finally found out where you are. Don't give up. You will be out soon.”

These were words Phong had quoted blithely in his letter sent from Malaysia in 1978. But how could she have managed this feat? Hasn't he wondered?

“My wife suffered so much,” I tell Mrs. An. She knows what happened, though she is properly tight-lipped about it. I have shown her the letter. It forced us to confront, with a level glare of determination, what happened to her and to our country after the war.

There was Quy as she opened the front door of our house and walked straight out into the somber glow of Saigon's postwar lassitude. I see the melancholy streets, even as the morning turned hectic. It was 1975 when the South fell. But it could have been 1963 as well, when President Diem was assassinated.

To understand what really happened in 1963 or in 1975 one would have had to follow her when she left the house and took a different route than the one she usually took. There was nothing accidental or provisional about this new turn of events. It was she who ensured my release from detention in 1963, just as it was she who arranged for her brother's and Phong's release from prison in 1978. She was the one who saved each one of us.

One event was a prelude to the other. Like a lagging ghost that refuses to leave, he was the blurred but defining force that prevailed through both events. He could claim authority, power, and advantage through both with no apparent consciousness of how others would in turn be diminished. I can still see his face in shadows, feel his eyes resting on her. There was Phong, holding his cigarette, narrowing his eyes and coveting. There was the wanton acceleration of desire and intrigue. There was the erotic charge that had to be satisfied. Could it be that everything—his calculated pursuit of her and the mysterious circumstances surrounding my release in 1963—boiled down to the cold finality of one simple fact? An even exchange? I am still lost in the solipsism of this one recurring question. I see the pure inflections of desire—his—its persistent swerves and dips, exacted and satisfied at last, in exchange for a life spared from the executioner's gun.

This fact remains the unshared secret. In 1963 Phong was the one in charge. Just as he knew then, he must have known even in 1975 that the world saw her as beautiful and that her beauty would save him and her brother.

Every loop and iteration of this one fact has raced relentlessly through my mind all these years. There is no fresh perspective to be gained. With redoubled certainty and from every vantage point, I can see his hand rest one millisecond too long on Quy's waist as he left the dinner at my house after the coup.

He was here but a few moments ago, a disfigured memory, standing over me. The overpowering smell of wet nicotine remains. I fumble for the bottle of eucalyptus oil and dab a few drops on my nose and throat. The change in him from one who inadvertently exposed too much in a letter written almost thirty years ago to one who paid perfectly composed visits to the nursing home and engaged in polite queries still jars. One thought enrages me, like a string of profanity: He is here but she is not.

Time does not pass. It refuses to pass.

Here are the facts as I have cobbled them together in my head. Quy was exchanging more than gold. Phong has been the one pulling the strings and making a mockery of us all and taking advantage of her contrasting virtue and our undeserving selves. It is a fact, this stark, allegorical contrast. I have read the entire letter many times but this time I unfold it and reread just the portions that still hurt the most.

“Don't give up. You will be out soon.”

Your brother-in-law and I looked at the tattered note the guard slipped to us. We thought to ourselves, she must be selling her gold.

We must get ourselves accustomed to hope again. We were not in a position to entertain the possibility of freedom. But now with Quy's note I thought constantly of leaving. I thought of seeing Quy again in Saigon, finding you in America. I could almost see our new lives, as if from a great height—its forms, its shapes, and its colors from the other side of the world's oceans, in North America. I was conscious that they were all exorbitant hopes, and far from being resolved. Still, I harbored them.

Having expected for so long to die inside this cell, imagine my surprise when one early morning, the door was opened and we were told we were being released. We would live, I thought to myself, by which I meant somewhere else. I was certain we would not remain in Vietnam. The guard gave us a note from your wife addressed to her brother. She was waiting for us. She enclosed money and travel papers for our bus ride back to Saigon. One of the guards even helped us to the bus terminal, me on my metal leg and your brother-in-law newly afflicted by a bent and diminished body.

Our human perversities were by no means extraordinary in postwar Saigon. Still, the women in our lives could barely recognize us. Your wife looked the same to me, as always full of beauty and grace. She glimmered in the sunlight as she touched my face and her brother's. Thu receded into the shadows to allow the main players their rightful place. Your brother-in-law sat on the floor, staring at his hands and occasionally lifting his legs here and there, as if he had not realized that he could move them. After a hiatus, Quy, forehead furrowed in concentration, quietly said, “You both must leave before they kill you.” I looked at us through her eyes. What did she see? The mirror reflected ghastly faces, sunken and fatigued. “It is the only way to save you,” she said. She meant her brother, though I would be included in any plan to leave. She sensed that our prison time together had indissolubly bound us. Her brother and I were almost like an elderly couple, muddling along. Our experiences had clearly shaken her. A shortwave radio under Quy's bed clandestinely tuned to the BBC kept us abreast of new dangers.

I looked around and took in the poignant austerity of our new lives. Old walls discarded their plaster and paint. There rose the smell of sodden laundry and heat trapped in unaired rooms. A blackened pot stood on the stove. Quý too had had to endure and improvise. Her face, however, remained untroubled by lines of age or worries. Still, something inestimable had been lost. The street, once so elegant, had turned dour. There were no crowds, no tourists, only the drab local cadres' booth at one end of the street. Every neighborhood had one. They were there to keep order and monitor the citizens. On the very first night we returned home, we were paid a visit. I was at once apprehensive. I heard the peremptory footsteps and a truculent knock on the door. There was a glum silence. Then came the request for us to show our papers so they could be promptly checked against the official family register for derelictions or unauthorized presences or absences. Such was the nature of our ordained defeat.

Quy greeted the cadre. There was a feeling of habitual familiarity between them. The mood shifted. It became more familial and responsive. It was clear that nothing had dispossessed her of her powers to charm. She offered him a cup of tea from the family's best set, its porcelain rim smooth and round. He waved it away. She returned with a basket of baguettes. She opened a bottle of bourbon and poured a glass for the guard. I instinctively swallowed, as if I had taken a big sip and felt its soothing heat wash the sharp edge of smoke down my throat. He said, “I have something for you,” addressing her with a respectful form of
you
. He passed her a note. She read it and then said to the guard, “Tell him I say thank you.” When the guard left, she flashed us a look filled with confidence and promise.

I imagine each scene in my head. Everything reminds me of our ballad of eternal love and loss. I feel Quy's private heart in the intervening spaces between the penned words. I see that day in Saigon, as if I were there when Phong and my brother-in-law were released.

My face burns, a red heat rising and retreating when I realize that the compulsory gratitude I have been carrying for Phong all these years was utterly misplaced. He had not protected us. Quy had.

A guard came to the house a few days later and handed us travel papers to Phan Thiet, a fishing town south of Saigon. We would leave Vietnam from there, on an expedition organized by Quy's Chinese friends. Two men were given free passage on the condition that they devote themselves to helping us survive the trip.

Everything is up to fate now, I thought, as I envisaged our implausible journey ahead. We hailed several cyclos to the bus terminal, got on a bus as if we were embarking on an ordinary trip. The lot was filled with trucks and buses—ancient engines coughing and snorting fumes. I carried a pouch of dried squid and Chinese sausage that reeked of sweetness and congealed fat. Quy took along a bag of toys to prove we were visiting relatives with young children if questioned. I was surprised by not just her willingness to go with us but also her apparent vigor. We did not have to cajole her. You know we would not have left without her. I believed Quy was eager to be reunited with you and Mai. While we were gone a letter from you arrived at your old house in Cholon and the mother of the new owner had saved it and hand-delivered it to Quy. We knew where you were. I believed that that knowledge injected Quy with hope and a desire for a new life, which, after all these grim postwar years, overcame her attachment to the old.

I recognized a dozen or so other passengers on the bus as people with plans like ours. Every nerve in my body was tensed up, alive, and in wait. The Vietnamese navy was known to shoot unauthorized boats on sight. So be it. We had to try. Quy, of course, was quiet, leaning against Thu's shoulders, her countenance utterly calm and composed.

We were part of a mass exodus that was unprecedented in Vietnam's venerable one-thousand-year history. Your brother-in-law and I understood the need for silence.

The ride itself was uneventful. At checkpoints, papers were produced, bribes pressed decorously into the palms of stern-faced guards. I kept my eyes on the rice fields. Here and there, buffalo herders, white ducks, and buffaloes mingled among straw shanties and blighted fields. Buses traveling in the opposite direction honked their horns and flicked their headlights in the gray dusk. After several hours, we could see water. A briny odor of fermented fish pervaded the air. It was clear we were approaching Phan Thiet.

After dropping most of the passengers off at the bus depot, the bus trundled toward a more obscure location perched across the rocky shoreline. The slender road dropped steeply seaward. We were all off to visit fishermen relatives. I assumed they were part of the stalwart Chinese network. Three men emerged from a house and pointed us toward a sandy area enclosed by fence rails. A boat was waiting for us there. Boats were nothing unusual here, of course. Leave in the daylight as if there were nothing to hide. If we had left at night, we would have been shot on the spot if caught.