The Lotus and the Storm (45 page)

The story lifts my heart. Something tender drifts unintelligibly toward me, the strain of hope against blood. I scan the rest, looking for confirmation of a name my heart already knows. I read on, spasmodically picking up keywords. Veteran. Wounded. Lost years. Returns to Vietnam. New life here.

James Baker. Resurrected. Never dead.

I sit still, my heart thunderous. Apparently, the American has a rigid routine. Every Monday he ventures to open-air markets to buy produce for the cook and then goes to Ben Thanh Market to eat at one of the food stalls and hawk the orphaned children's wares at one of its most heavily trafficked corridors. Every Wednesday and Thursday, he gives two hours of English lessons. And on top of everything, the writer remarks, he spends time making connections with a number of nongovernment agencies to promote the orphanage.

I am perched on the chair's edge. Is it another James Baker whose name is etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? Can there be another James Baker? Here, in Vietnam?

Later, I Google the name and get pages and pages of search results. Indeed, it is a common name, but the facts are matched up with dates. The man in the photo has the same way of standing. It is James.

The certainty of the knowledge suggests that there is no internal static or dissent. All of us are together and aligned.

We all know it, Cecile and Bao too.

BAO, 2006

F
or Mai, this trip was flawed from the start. But now that she is here, she is beginning to give in to my full range of emotions, to my recriminations and my sadness. Her mood has turned conciliatory and, of course, now hopeful.

It is Monday. We venture to the middle of the city's raucous central market. Where would a mixed-race woman go to make a living? Here, I think, a crowded place filled with vendors and beggars jostling for money and space. That is but a tangential and secondary hope.

Before us is the clock, blunt and massive, that hangs on the external wall of Ben Thanh Market. This is the compass point of downtown Saigon. Tourists, drawn by the weathered flea market's charm, will tolerate the unruly throngs of smooth-talking pushers hawking every object imaginable.

Mai has no intention of buying anything or even window-shopping. Neither do I. There is an urgency inside me. Mai leads the way expectantly. I find myself walking toward the center, as if ushered by the visceral compulsion of memory. I know exactly where to go.

The air smells of the hearty aromas of various soups simmering on stoves. There are rows upon rows of stalls selling fabric, bags, shoes stacked in towers of multicolored, glittering likenesses. The interior is cloistered and dark, slightly stale, a relentlessly uniform grayness ruptured by only the occasional shafts of natural light that spill through curtained windows. There are exposed pipes, protruding nails, crude, mismatched furniture, and wood floors with broken planks. I feel the flow and rush of pedestrian tourist traffic and the quiet thrill of haggling.

A child follows me, tugging at my shirt, pleading in monosyllables, her voice gentle and plaintive. A woman stands before her fish display, auctioning off giant lobsters and crabs and deep-sea bass. She is pointing to the pink flesh of the fish and the finger-sized anchovies. Next to a basket of catfish, a tangle of pincers, tied by rubber bands, struggle for forward motion.

I find myself staring at the fishmonger, assessing her facial features despite the infinitesimal chance that she would be our mother's lost daughter. Still, even in the random ordering of the world, even against unimaginable probabilities, fate has managed to rear its head. It is not impossible. The woman is in her thirties. I study the eyes, the nose, where the balance of racial mix is most discernible. She senses me observing her and waves me forth. I hold her gaze and walk away, taking her seaweed odor with me.

Mai and I scan the crowd, our gaze directed in counterpoint at the foreshortened mix of stalls made from corrugated steel and plywood. Our habitual sense of distance has broken down—we are together in a common quest. Everyone is eating, enthusiastically, some squatting, their haunches practically touching the floor, some on stools, others firmly ensconced in chairs. It is a serious enterprise here, eating. Loud voices permeate the market. Mai winds her way through the labyrinth of stalls and booths illumined by neon tubes mounted from the ceiling. A man sits on a low footstool sucking marrow from a bone, his head bent over his plate. Mai stares at him. I know what she is thinking: Bao too sits and eats exactly that way, squatting, back stooped, face to plate. Nothing goes to waste when she eats, gristle, fat, collagen, marrow, tendon, or cartilage.

Here in Saigon, she is face-to-face with the rival counterworld that I inhabit without ambivalence. After more than thirty years in America, I remain wholly and quintessentially Vietnamese, tethered to this place.

From a measured distance, a man catches my eye. I see broad shoulders and thick, wavy hair that shines. His presence fills the room. I see only his back through a rush of people in the dusty, main hallway. It is hard to say what he looks like from behind. But still, I know.

The man is wearing a cotton ribbed tank top, revealing bare arms and shoulders. Around him, vendors sit on low wooden stools smoothed and beveled by wear. They are hunched over the squat grayness of their own shadows. He is sitting by a stove that hisses blue and yellow flames atop a bed of burned-orange coals. A pot burbles, its lid clanging against the metal. By the smell, I can tell it is a Hue noodle soup, gilded broth, sawtooth herb, lemongrass, tomato, and shrimp paste, with lime, onion, and a madness of hot pepper and garnishes. The vendor, a woman with a crooked grin, throws in a dash of this, a soupçon of that, which produces a version of Hue noodle soup that is uniquely hers. Its richness comes not from fat but from marrow. I cast my eyes on the line of pushcarts, each advertising the chef's specialty: griddled rice cake, vermicelli with minced pork balls and caramelized shallots, green papaya with chicken and shrimp.

Mai too is feeling the pull and push of feelings crowding in her chest, surging and receding. Lured by hope, she has come here after reading the magazine story to search for James. Almost against my volition, I lean against the wall, a respectable distance behind him, and watch. An electric fan rustles cool air about. The man is drinking a beer, laughing at something the vendor said. He is smoking and inhaling deeply as he reaches for a bowl of soup.

The man must have felt our eyes on him. He turns, his face flushed with the full sun and glazed with sweat. He is absolutely himself, in an offhand, handsome way. Everything jams and stalls. I know even before I see.

For years Mai has blamed me for his death. But here he is now, alive, in this single, well-aimed moment among all the unfixed, infinite number of moments in time.

On his arm, immortalized in a cobalt blue tattoo, is the date of our sister's death. That day when God of omnipotent power looked down and did nothing, choosing instead to dispatch salvation to some other select few. I see the date, pixel by pixel, as if it were held in the lens of a digital camera.

He stands and picks up his knapsack. He is turning toward me, and when he sees my face he freezes. I am not sure if he is surprised to see me, or if he takes my appearance, though startling, as something long anticipated.

There is a brief faltering. James stands up, rocks on his feet, and looks quizzically at Mai, cocking his head to one side as he fixes her in his heart and mind. And then he says something and smiles. Eventually I hear: “You look just the same.” There are tears in his eyes. His voice is lucid, with a grave undertow. “Mai,” he says, with an upward inflection.

Tears well up beneath my eyelids. Mai squeezes her eyes shut. I feel the tremors in her knees. It is James's voice. It is the missing voice, emerging from an acoustical silence. He is here, outside her imagination. She sees him as he is now, a man who appears to be in his midfifties, though he must be older, juxtaposed against his younger self almost forty years before. With that one word, she is pared down and stripped, made not invisible but too visible, seen at last but too much so for comfort.

He calls her name again and again. Somehow he has survived, I keep thinking. That we are both here and alive owes more to luck than to our own judiciousness. I realize he is talking but that one simple thought, that he is alive, cracks and glows and fills my head so completely that I hardly listen to what he is saying.

Mai follows him. They head nowhere in particular. I am surprised that she wants to put her hands on him, on his arm and his face, whether to feel his flesh or to comfort she doesn't know. He interweaves his fingers with hers. They walk calmly to extend the sweetness of the moment, slowing down the rushing world. She lays a finger on his arm to fix his attention on bootleg CDs of Rolling Stones classics. She cannot find the words to fit her feelings. So she tells him she is amazed by the audacious display of counterfeit movies and music in plain sight. She tells him that it must be a violation of Vietnam's obligations under World Trade Organization law and he chuckles.

She wants to say “I thought you died,” but the words resist. The spoken word, language, feels awkward, a clumsy attempt at translating untranslatable feelings from a deep emotional well. What matters is the healing presence that being next to him brings. What matters is the fact that he is here. That we are all here. The world that was certified by subtraction is restored for now to its proper balance.

He recounts for Mai the facts of his life, the random trail it has taken. Of course it matters what has happened to him all these years. But it is his mere presence that I am drawn to.

You stare at the face of a loved one you have not seen for so many years. You remember that last moment in time when you saw him and you see a broken mosaic of images—the perverse persistence of that one day. A day that has now flattened and faded. A chimney, a kite, a rifle. You imagine his wound and the depression it made on impact. You are pulled by the whipping tangle of that memory back to that time. You are trailed by your past, carrying it with you like an evershadowing present.

There is a long moment of silence. “They had mistaken me for dead when I was shot in your garden and dumped me onto a truck.”

The words are too much. Mai feels as if she too has received a wound.

I think about the compulsive secret Mai and I share, that we have a stone in our heart where our sister used to be. She taught us love and pain and hurt. I still insist it all began with our sister. But of course, who is to say what is the first cause or the last cause?

“Mai,” he says. He is pulling her hand, leading her through the foot traffic, warning her about the buckled sidewalks and the skittering pebbles. Occasionally he stops to buy a beer or a pack of cigarettes. The vendors all seem to know him. He inhales deeply, pulling smoke into his lungs, making a long satisfied sound.

I look at him, not to see what he looks like but to take him in. I too have felt the way he must have. For us both, there is the life before the war and the life after. And the one after, the one we try to bend and shape and reconfigure, filled with methodical pursuits tied to no great unifying purpose, hardly seems worthwhile.

James puts his hand gently against the back of Mai's neck. “Look,” he says. He pulls several photos from his wallet and goes through them as if he were dealing cards. He chooses one from the lot and hands it to her. There we are, caught by the camera's flash, James, our sister, and Mai, pinned in time and place. I see Mai on the edge of the photograph, pressing herself close to the center so that she would not be accidentally excluded when our Chinese grandmother shot the picture.

“You have kept it all these years,” Mai says softly. She runs her fingertips lightly over the wrinkles. He brushes a stray hair from her forehead. He gives her a gaze that is focused and intense, to be received on privately different terms. After tragedies and travesties, he is here, aiming a beacon into the heart, where our mutual loyalties remain undiluted.

James takes Mai's hand to his cheeks. And then he puts her hand to his head and squeezes her palm. She does not recoil. She rakes through his hair and feels a deeply indented concavity of sunken skin depressed against bone. It is hard, like deformed metal covering an old, terrible wound that must still throb. I can only guess what he endured after 1968.

In the outdoor light, the other scar, on his underarm, glistens and flashes. Mai stares at it, a cicatrix smoothed by time. In the heat, the still tender tissue bubbles pink and red against a web of fine blue veins.

Mai grips his arm as James thrusts his hands in his pockets. The sky, thick and striated, is turning purple. They make their way along crosshatched streets, through the long parabolic curve of peak-hour traffic, through the scrimmaging density of motorbikes and pedestrians, to amble along Tu Do Street with its rows of silk and handicraft stores.

Air conditioners drip onto sidewalks. Mai stops at the Givral restaurant, amazed that she still remembers the place vividly. They move on to Brodard, where they buy a cup of orange and durian ice cream. Soon they are by the harbor, next to a black statue of a national hero who led an important fight against the Chinese. A line of light glimmers in the distance where sky and river meet. The water pulses and glistens. A haze makes its hot, ragged climb, rising from its skin as the sky fades into dusk and the horizon is foreshortened by a hovering mist. They walk side by side along the paved banks, his palm against the small of her back. Water laps at the riverbed. James occasionally stops and turns his body so he is directly in front of her. He smiles. “You were a child. A wonderfully perfect little child. And now . . .” He puts his arm around her. Mai beams.

It slips from him automatically: “You have your mother's face.” He puts one hand on his heart as if to cup it.

Mai bites her tongue, overtaken by so many feelings churning among the warren of partitions inside her. We are usually double-chained and padlocked, but here in Saigon, Cecile and I are sprung. All of us are amazed to have found James alive, and when we are unified our common emotion turns out to be strong, like a swelling of the senses. It is a rare moment of coherence among us.

I know what Mai is feeling. For the first time in a long time, she stands before someone who sees her as she was. Innocent. Perfect. Child.

Streetlamps shed pools of light along the boulevard. The air is fragrant. Fruit trees are laden with ripened fruits waiting to be picked. The first mangoes of the season hang from trees. Tamarind pods burst open, their shells honeyed by the sun. I am not sure where we are but it is beginning to get dark and the day's heat has long peaked and is finally receding. Night is coming soon, but of course they will not part. They are joined together by something enormous. They are both aware that every filament of their newly found connection needs to be nurtured.

James takes her arm and guides her down an unobtrusive side street to a local eatery. Mai is not hungry but is eager to go with him. He assures her she will love the food. The waitress gives James a questioning glance and arranges a tray of fried squid, dumplings, beef morsels, and French baguettes on the table. When the electricity goes out, the waitress lights candles and hands James a bottle of beer, which he uses to wash down a handful of pills. Soft shadows slide along the walls. Light reflects against James's watch. Extra candles and flashlights lie on the table. Mai shoots him a rogue glance. It is only now that she is taking the time to look at him. Through his tank top, she can still see the hard, ropy muscles that jump when his back moves. He was always physically active when we knew him. But there are perceptible advances of aging. His hair, though thick, is graying. But he is still lithe and compact. New lines and the perpetual shadow of inadequate sleep have formed around the eyes. His face, burnished by the years, is still angular and chiseled but clearly careworn.