RAIN DELAYED NAPOLEON. He wanted the ground to dry out a little before the attack. Wellington’s army was over here, on St Jean, but they withstood repeated attacks. By nightfall they counter-attacked and drove the French from the field … There were heavy losses on all sides.’
I already knew the story. It struck me then that not once had my father told me a fairy tale; he’d probably known none. But war stories he told too often, turning our dining room table into the battlefield, our spoons and chopsticks into battalions, bowls into bases and hills. The Duke of Wellington was drunk. Napolean was not, but there was nothing he could do; he was there, against fate.
This is our European vacation: our last as a family. I don’t remember much about getting to Waterloo, except that the countryside was streaked and blurred, light over darker green under a dismal grey sky. Father drove; I had the map; Mother had a headache and complained about the cold, why we didn’t go to the hotel first to drop off our luggage and what the rush was to see another battlefield, in Belgium of all places.
I gave wrong directions. Father cursed, calling me names in French. I was rude, also in French, which surprised him since I rarely spoke the language. Everyone was tense. We’d turned into an American family, complete with sullen teenager and bickering parents.
It was still grey out when we reached windswept Mount St Jean – more a topographical bump, really – that overlooked the battlefield. Mother declined the climb, made a show of sniffling, and went to the souvenir shop for hot chocolate. Father was flailing by the time we reached the top, but I could tell he was excited and all at once he was pointing wildly and talking and trying to catch his breath. There, Napoleon’s army stood. Over there stood Wellington. It is close, very close. The Imperial Guard, the crème de la France, he calls them, assail the British line at great cost and victory is within his grasp when, from there, the Prussians come. Father’s favourite military tactician has lost and is exiled to St Helena, where he dies.
After so many years of hearing this story, it should have meant something to finally see the place, but that summer afternoon I was homesick and missed K and was replaying over and over our first kiss by the ocean. It was why I misread the map, why it was not until Father stopped talking and looked out to the far-off distance in the direction of Napoleon’s flight that I actually looked around me. There was no war here, just a gossamer mist drifting over green pasture, the air faintly smelling of upturned earth, the wind in my ears.
I looked at Father, who, his story done, seemed so alone and a little lost. His sparse hair was tousled by the wind, his face contemplative. It came to me then that this was how he looked on that naval ship as they headed to Subic Bay. I saw him staring at his gun for a long, long time before he tossed it into the sea.
A deep sadness welled up in me and lodged in my throat. I felt like I was suffocating, and had to turn away for fear that Father might see tears brimming in my eyes and think that I, too, was mourning Napoleon’s defeat.
* * *
My father was a colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the losing side when decades of war ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Now, he’s a retired bank executive and an American citizen, energetic in his late sixties, fond of weekend tennis, swimming in summer, and tae kwon do each afternoon out by the pool.
He also drives my mother crazy.
Father likes to fix things around the house. Sometimes I think American life is just like a sitcom, but where the laugh track should be there are mostly tears. Changing a washer leads to a burst pipe and a flood in the kitchen; repairing small cracks in the dining-room wall ends with broken glass and the destruction of a Marc Chagall poster, the one depicting the hectic atmosphere of a circus in swathes of turbulent red, blue and orange. In the garden, where Mother grew azaleas, hibiscus, daffodils and roses, he drove a shovel through the root ball of her favourite rose bush after deciding it needed to be in a sunnier spot.
‘He is killing me,’ Mother appealed down the phone. ‘Come home. Do something!’
Mother wanted him out of her way, preferably confined to his study, where he was writing, off and on, his wartime memoir, or in his armchair with his Chivas Regal on the rocks watching CNN and intermittently cursing in French, his default language when angry, at the woeful state of the world.
Over whisky and dried squid one visit, I tried the Vietnamese approach: ‘Ba, why don’t you teach? Lots of high schools around here need teachers.’
‘Yes,’ Mother yelled from the kitchen. ‘That’s good idea!’ This she said in English, a language she disliked, claiming it hurt her ears. ‘Your father, he is great, great teacher!’
CNN was playing up footage of a train wreck somewhere in India. As I talked, Father stared at the dead being removed from the mangled cars and grunted. Now, depending on the intonation, I had learned that his ‘huh’ has many meanings. It might mean ‘Let me think about it’ or ‘Really?’ or ‘India’s train system is despicable’. It could also mean ‘Back off, mister’. It was the last of these.
‘Why not?’ Mother persisted. ‘You speak French. You are good, very good, in math. You got MBA. Can teach PE even, with your three-degree black belt.’
‘Third degree,’ Father corrected.
‘Yes, why not? Extra income not so bad.’ Then she switched to French and said they could use the money to go to France again. Father raised an eyebrow and glanced sideways at her. My mother hated France, hated Europe. After their last trip to Paris she swore that if she ever saw another rude Frenchman it would be one too many, our relatives in Paris and Lyon be damned.
Father loved Paris. He loved France. Born into an upper-class Chinese-Vietnamese family in colonial Vietnam, he had French citizenship and as a student had spent a year in Paris. But, like his uncle who fought in the Algerian war, Father was conscripted to serve in the French army to fight against Ho Chi Minh and left behind a blonde girlfriend and his dream of becoming a lawyer. After the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was split in two. Father stayed in the south and in the army, and met and married Mother, a refugee from Hanoi. They had two children. By the time the American war got into full swing, he was a colonel. He was thirty-three. Ten years later, he was without his army and his country.
CNN had moved from carnage to chaos, a riot in some ancient, dusty city in the Middle East, with soldiers shooting tear gas at a fleeing crowd and clubbing those who didn’t run fast enough.
Father muttered ‘Putain’, as if the protesters deserved worse.
* * *
Their laughter could be heard from the street when I stopped by and found Father, drunk mid-afternoon, boasting to Uncle Duy, his brother-in-law, about passing the exams to become a high-school teacher. He had his certificate and, within days, a part-time teaching position at a nearby school.
‘The others taking the test, they said, “Colonel, you’re amazing!” but I said, “Not really. You young men should have prepared. You probably played too hard, or just too lazy to study? Go back and study seriously this time and you’ll do well”.’ Then Father added, ‘Of course, they’re right. I suppose, at my age, I am amazing.’
‘Watch that tongue!’ Mother yelled from the kitchen where she was washing salad with her sister, Aunty Ly. Mother’s lifelong occupation, it seems, was to keep everyone’s tongues in check, especially Father’s. Aunty Ly shook her head as she looked at Mother with sympathy, and said, ‘Sister is right. No one likes an indelicate man.’ Then, in a lower voice, as she watched Mother adjust the faucet to keep it from leaking, ‘Or an amateur plumber!’
‘Huh!’ Father said, and continued boasting to Uncle. Once a captain in the ARVN airborne division, Uncle Duy for years fixed refrigerators and heaters for a living until he too retired, and took to repainting his past, how he was manager at his company, how he was a doctor in the ARVN.
I hugged Mother hello. She whispered: ‘Mama’s saved!’
Aunty Ly then hugged me and whispered. ‘Now, Ethan, save Aunty. Get Uncle a job too. Please!’
What ‘saved’ my mother were the frequent visits of relatives and friends, and in part, the house itself – a five-bedroom suburban home on the northern edge of Silicon Valley at the foot of the mountains; plenty of room for them to find peace from each other.
Mr Lopez, their chatty neighbour from the Philippines who owned a busy auto shop on Calaveras and Brentwood, confirmed their life to be the ‘Amerrican drrream!’ He said it so often, over-trilling the ‘r’ each time, that it became something as tangible as his black BMW or his wife’s cherry-red Porsche. A burly man, Mr Lopez always complimented my parents on their, and their children’s, achievements whenever they chatted across the fence, which let him boast about his own, though he never mentioned his two obese kids who were still in high school and threw noisy and dangerous parties when their parents were away – the youngest was facing charges for dealing dope.
Behind his back Mother called him ‘Mister Good for You’, which was her usual response to his vainglory. If it weren’t for his discount tune-ups, and the crunchy persimmons that grew in abundance on the tree that draped over our fence in the backyard, Mother wouldn’t have bothered. Mother, who loved the fruit and always left the freshest as an ancestral offering at the family altar, gave Mrs Lopez roses in return.
My parents believed family was private business, and the past best left alone. Not that they hid themselves, or anything. Their biography of sorts was on display on the mantel for all to see: framed black-and-white photos we managed to take with us when we fled at the end of the war. Life in America was for my parents a big let down, a reality defined by disappointment and loss. They would never have in America what had been taken from them in Vietnam.
In one photo, Father is emerging from his helicopter, silver baton in his left hand, his right reaching out to a young army officer who stands with hunched shoulders under the whirling rotor blades that push down on the elephant grass. In the distance are the silhouettes of bent-backed farmers in conical hats. Father’s face is dark and sombre.
In another, a little boy in suit with bow tie, an older girl in a red ao-dai dress. I am the young boy: round face, cute, I supposed, in a gloomy way. I rarely smile in the old pictures. My sister holds our dog Medor, a Japanese poodle, which has shed on her dress. We stand on the landing of the stone steps of our villa. It was in Dalat, a hill station the French had built a century ago as a summer refuge, and to remind them of home.
Another. Mother and Father. A beautiful couple would be understating it. She wears her multi-stranded gold bead necklace outside her lavender brocade. She looks stunning and regal. Father, on the thin side, is dignified and suave in a grey silk suit, a cigarette in his hand. The picture is most definitely posed. It is the first day of Tet. Behind them, two Chinese brush paintings hang on the wall, one showing a gathering of Chinese fairies on clouds, the other a ferocious dragon descending from a misty mountain. I don’t know why, but I have a flashback to when I am a little boy, hiding inside Mother’s walk-in closet, the size of a small room with windows opened and in the breeze sway the hundred or so painted and embroidered ao-dai dresses and brocades. I can smell the camphor and Guerlain. I am lost among the fabric. From far away I hear my sister’s voice calling out: ‘Father’s home! Father’s home!’
None of the pictures show how it all ended. There are plenty of those online under ‘Fall of Saigon’ or ‘April 30, 1975’, ‘Vietnam evacuation’, ‘Evacuation+Saigon’. Tens of thousands of them. Tanks rolling into Saigon; helicopters flying out to awaiting American ships; fear-stricken Vietnamese climbing over the razor wire of the American embassy. There are no pictures of my mother, my sister and me crowded into a C-147 cargo plane two days before the end.
I remember a green sea below the plane’s window, the wails of a woman, the smell of vomit, night turning into day then back into night, the throbbing of the engines, green tents flapping in the wind, a scorching sun, long lines for food.
Father left after us, on a warship with hundreds of well-placed others, for the US Navy base at Subic Bay in the Philippines and asylum. He folded away his army uniform, changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and tossed his gun into the sea.
I was seven when I came to America, old enough to remember, young enough to change.
If I still remember playing soldier with Father, hiding behind the couch and taking imaginary shots at him, if I still remember wanting to grow up and march in his soldierly footsteps, I also learned to quickly outgrow that childhood vision.
I grew up here, after all, reached puberty here, fell in love here. When my voice broke, it felt as if my new American self was being born inside me. My Vietnamese self receded, as the country had done from the C-147’s window, into the stuff of dreams, a place that might haunt my parents nightly, but irretrievable just the same.
And yet …
* * *
I was in the middle of a meeting when Mother called. My secretary slipped me a note: It’s Mama! Frantic – Or the usual?
‘Can you believe it? He break bricks!’
‘What? Is Dad alright?’
‘With hand! At his age! Who your father think he is? Superman Teacher? Bruce Lee Teacher?’
Father had a troublemaker in one of his classes. A sixteen-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese named David Huan. Tigers pranced on his biceps, snakes slithered. Mother has the gift of storytelling and can make an entire epic from very little information. This story relied on a classic scenario, in which the novice teacher is tested by the headstrong student. But the story is about Father, so there will be a twist in its tail. I signal that I’ll be a while and my secretary closes the door.
Father enters the classroom. A boy is sitting on his desk, talking with a few heavily made-up girls who giggle as they comb through their hair or repaint their lips. Neither he nor the girls pay any attention to the new teacher. Father loses it. ‘All of you, shut up! You … Sit down! Sit, or I will break your neck! I have a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do.’
Silence, for a moment, then a flurry of questions.
‘Serious? How’d you learn it?’
‘You’re like Mr Miyagi in Karate Kid, right?’
Laughter.
‘But aren’t you, kinda, like, too old to break our necks?’ This is from the tattooed boy, David Huan, who still sits on Father’s desk. ‘Why don’t you break Tony’s neck? He’s skinny. It shouldn’t be too hard.’
More laughter. ‘Ha ha,’ says Tony.
‘Yeah, show us!’ someone yells.
‘Show us!’ echoes the class. ‘Show us!’
Father orders silence, and to maintain it tells them how he was a soldier, an officer, in South Vietnam fighting the Communists. He is still within their knowledge zone, and they are still silent, so he continues. Father learned martial arts from the Korean soldiers at the military academy in Dalat, called Vo Bi. He came to America many years ago and thought about teaching tae kwon do – he takes a dramatic defensive stance here and wins them back. Instead, he became a banker, but he practises every day. He has told a room full of teenagers in ten minutes more than he has Mr Lopez in fifteen years.
‘What rank were you, mister? My dad was a sergeant. He knew some kung fu too.’
‘Did you kill Commies with your bare hands?’
All of them are talking. Few remain at their desks. Some mimic kung fu moves. It is mayhem, until David Huan gets up finally and lets out a piercing whistle. The class falls silent. He turns to Father: ‘Okay, Mister I-Break-Your-Neck. We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Today. Tomorrow, you have to prove it.’
The next day, Father finds three orange bricks on his desk and David Huan sitting up front, chin on knuckles. ‘Judgment day, teach,’ he says, a green dragon dancing to the flex of a bicep. ‘I’ll be satisfied with one brick.’
Now, Father hasn’t broken a brick in maybe a couple of decades. And even three at a time wasn’t a problem back then. These days he practises his poomse – a sequence of martial arts movements – but he hasn’t seriously sparred with anyone for many years, or broken anything, Marc Chagall and water pipes notwithstanding.
‘I accept your challenge,’ he says, puts down his briefcase, sets the bricks on the floor, two edgeways, the third across the top. He takes off his suit jacket and tie, rolls back his shirtsleeves, and takes his brick-breaking stance. He makes a few air chops, slowly at first, then more focused. Even so, he still looks like a grey-haired, dark-skinned Asian man in his sixties.
The students form a semi-circle behind him, jostling for view. He shouts to help concentrate his fighting spirit as he chops down on the brick. It doesn’t break. His hand goes numb. Jeers. Father shouts his kiai again and chops. Still no effect. He closes his eyes. There is laughter. Perhaps he’s thinking of the war, of the necks that he actually did break.
He breathes calmly, then releases a deafening ‘Harhhhh!’ as his hand descends a third time and the brick breaks neatly in half. The kids cheer. David Huan gives Father the thumbs up and a boyish, crooked grin.
Word spreads quickly. In the corridors, it’s ‘Hi Mister I-Break-Your-Neck’ for the rest of the day as Father’s hand swells and throbs and turns blue. Writing on the blackboard is agony. In the teachers’ lounge at lunch he soaks his hand in iced water. The school nurse says she doesn’t think it is broken, but makes him go for an X-ray to check for a possible fracture. She calls him, not unkindly, ‘an old fool’.
‘I said to him “Are you crazy!”,’ Mother said on the phone. “At your age? What you going to do next? Kickboxing? Join the 49ers?” Your father, he is killing me!’
* * *
If David Huan was passionate about anything, it was martial arts. Though his juvenile record was rumoured to be extensive, it wasn’t. I checked. He was arrested only once for breaking and entering. He stole from his neighbour who, charmed by the offer to mow his lawn and clean his yard for a year, dropped the charges.
Sometimes he would call my father ‘Mister I-Break-Your-Neck’, but mostly it was ‘Siu Phu’, Chinese for teacher, or in Vietnamese the most intimate ‘Thay’.
He first showed up at my parents’ house not long after the brick incident. He was there for extra math and English lessons, but I think mostly he came for the war stories and martial arts. He got a lesson after schoolwork was done for the evening. Mother, normally highly suspicious of strangers, and one with tattoos no less, turned into a doting ‘Siu Mau’ – wife of teacher. Father never had any classroom problems when David Huan was in the room.
I was barely acknowledged when, late one afternoon, I dropped by and found the three of them engrossed in a Hong Kong kung-fu movie, early Jackie Chan, it could have been any of them. Vicious assailant murders protagonist’s beloved kung-fu teacher. Hero confronts villain, but is badly defeated and barely survives. Rescued by an eccentric beggar drunk who, after pleading and supplication, agrees to teach Hero amazing fighting technique, which for some reason requires being very drunk. Hero struggles with steely determination and, though bloodied and terribly wounded, kills powerful villain. The End.
‘That’s what heroes are made of,’ Father said.
David saw me roll my eyes, and giggled. I liked him immediately.
At dinner, David was a perfect guest, sincere in his compliments for Mother’s cooking – ‘Wow, taste like expensive restaurant. Siu Mau, I want to move in!’ – and earnest as he asked Father to tell his war stories – ‘Siu Phu, you never finished that story about how you kicked VC ass in handto-hand combat.’
It was one of Father’s more famous stories. He needed to take a leak and ordered his pilot to land their helicopter. There were a couple of Viet Cong hiding in nearby bush, but they were too terrified to shoot him, or didn’t want to give away their position – either works. Father had already spotted them, but took his time doing his business and, after slowly buttoning up, launched himself into a dive, grabbed one and shot the other with his service pistol at close range in the chest. He knocked the live one out with a chop to the neck, dumped him in the helicopter and brought him back to base to be interrogated. The story is true. It is told and retold by soldiers on both sides because hand-to-hand combat is pretty rare in any war, and for a colonel to be involved rarer still.
In the middle of Father’s story, David looked at me with that smirk. Then he eyed his water glass. I looked at mine. At first I thought it was a mild earthquake. The water rippled. But Huan subtly gestured his chin toward Father. As he told the story, Father was absentmindedly chopping the edge of his right hand against the edge of the dining table. No doubt he was honing his brick-breaking skill for the next year. I could hear the utensils subtly rattle against each other and against the china at his every chop.
* * *
‘So Ethan, what's your story?’ Huan asked me later outside, where I'd gone to have a cigarette. He was jumping up and down to keep warm. We were in the backyard. It was windy and he didn't have a jacket.
‘Don't have one,’ I said and offered him a cigarette, our hands cupping together as I lit it for him. It was a clear sky, and the moon, almost perfect, was exceptionally bright.
‘Dude. Everybody's got one.’
‘Okay,’ I said, fairly sure he was smarter than he let on. ‘Remember, you asked for it. I'm gay and liberal. He's conservative and gloomy. My mother's manic and hysterical. They're ashamed of who I am. My sister avoids it all by marrying someone in another state. It sucks, but I play the dutiful Vietnamese son and come when they call. We're like total strangers. They don't acknowledge my partner. I can go on …’
‘Whoa, dude!’ He dragged on his cigarette and looked at me sideways. I half expected him to go back inside, or say something crude. But after a full exhale, he said ‘Yup, that's a story. I'm cool with that. I don't care. The gay thing, I mean. I like pussy myself, but you do what you gotta do.
I laughed.
He Giggled.
Huan was a lot more charismatic than I had imagined from my parents' reports, more cocky and, when he laughed, very young.
‘Your parents are proud of you, though,’ he said. ‘They brag to me about your accomplishments. Your dad’s cool. I wish I had him for a father. Mine was a prick, always in debt. He’d get drunk and beat my Ma, brother and me. When I got old enough I kicked his ass out of the house.’ He paused then and looked up at the sky. ‘Some dude in Reno stabbed him in the heart.’ The last bit sounded like an afterthought.
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t be.’ He twisted the hot ember out of the cigarette stub and scattered it out in the grass, pocketing the spent butt. ‘I hate that American phrase. Always apologising for things they got nothing to do with, never apologising for things they did.’ Before I managed a reply to say that it’s not they but we, he changed the topic. ‘Siu Phu is cool. He never goes back on his word. Proud old guy. Showed me some good moves today, man. Harmony. Fluidity. All that stuff.’
‘He showed me some too,’ I offered. ‘But harmony is probably overrated
– it works only for some and not others.’ ‘Huh?’
‘When I was young, younger than you, he taught me. He was always yelling, cursing me out, how I lacked attention and motivation. When he caught me kissing my best friend the lessons ended. I was sixteen. We barely talked after. Harmony means holding your tongue. And I never learned to break any bricks. You can probably kick my ass with one hand tied behind your back.’
‘You’re still in good shape,’ Huan offered, then endeared himself more to me by adding: ‘For an old guy.’
‘Thanks, I think. Since I can’t kick ass, I run. But I do who I wanna do.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, besides, if I kick your ass, you being a lawyer, you’ll sue mine.’ He took a long drag. Then his voice was different, quieter. ‘You guys are so lucky. Seriously. All success. I saw the photos and trophies under the altar. And all those awards. We’re poor as dirt, dumb as oxen.’
‘Don’t underestimate dirt,’ I said. ‘It keeps this garden lush.’
‘Yeah, right.’
We were both quiet for a minute or so, just breathing in the cold air and making clouds of our breath. We had another cigarette.
‘Look, David, you’re way smarter than me when I was at your age. You could have given the old man two bricks to break, but you didn’t. And honestly, do you really like my mother’s cooking? She’s lost her taste buds. She puts too much fish sauce in everything.’
He was about to defend himself, but Mother opened the sliding door, scolded us to come in out of the cold, and announced that there was tapioca and banana in coconut milk dessert, before declaring to the neighbourhood that we had both been smoking. ‘What a nasty habit!’
Huan was politely contrite and swore he’d try his best to give it up and, to prove his sincerity, snubbed out his cigarette. Mother seemed satisfied and gave me a dirty look as I continued to smoke mine.
The moment she disappeared back inside, Huan, giggling, asked me for another cigarette. I gave him the pack, and the disposable lighter too; a reward of sorts. I went in first, to eat Mother’s coconut pudding, and to buy him some time to just stare at the moon and the starry sky.
* * *
My mother loved to clean. As far back as I can remember, cleanliness for her was, if not godly, then something akin to religious devotion. Memories of servants cutting grass, waxing floors, rinsing fresh vegetables in purple iodine, and boiling water for drinking are still vivid in my mind. So is the sting of the hot washcloth scrubbing against my skin, and that painful way she cut my fingernails, always too close to the quick – sometimes drawing blood. Even the two poodles suffered her attentions when they appeared to be mildly morose. Mother, who was trained as a nurse before her parents made her marry Father against her will, seemed to think that vigilance was enough to keep the dirty world in its place.
A childhood memory: I am sitting with Mother in a slow-moving jeep in Saigon. It is night. Under a thatched roof lit with blinking Christmas lights, a girl in a miniskirt is bargaining with an American GI. The deal is struck. The GI, sweaty, drunk, reaches for her. ‘Don’t you dare look!’ Mother says as her hand goes up to cover my eyes. ‘How dirty!’ I hear her say and the chauffeur agrees, ‘Yes, Madame! They are.’ But through the cracks between her fingers I peek and see the GI’s hand go up under the miniskirt.
In America, whenever actors kissed and made love and showed skin on TV, Mother would tell me to change the channel if I was alone, or cover my eyes if she was sitting next to me on the couch. Until I was ten or eleven, I didn’t know that I could pull away. Mother sometimes called sex ‘la cochonnerie’, or in Vietnamese, ‘playing the game of pigs’. Women who betrayed or lied or stole another’s husband were ‘odious’ or ‘stinking, dirty whores’, and once, ‘bloodsucking vampires’.
But without servants and with a full-time job, Mother found it impossible to keep our home as clean as she would have liked and dust gathered, even at the most sacred area, the ancestral altar on top of the bookshelf in the living room, where she prayed and lit incense and talked to the dead each night.
None of which makes for a particularly healthy environment in which to undergo puberty because, in the dark of night, with my hand gripping my insatiable erection and my mind on Johnny Moore’s round smooth ass – the way he stood under the shower in the PE room with soapy water running between his crack – I also thought of dirt. Later, I’d be able to identify it as the classic war between humiliating shame and overwhelming desire, but then it was something I didn’t understand or dare to name even at that moment of orgasm when we are at our most honest with ourselves, if nobody else.
Unable to put words to my feelings, I stopped talking altogether and, though the old, insular world was gone, did nothing to break away from its parochial powers. There were a few shouting matches, of course – apparently when self-enforced mutes speak they tend to scream – but even then I lacked the courage and the self-knowledge, and therefore, the words to say what I wanted to say.
My America, as far as I could remember, was always compartmentalised. There was my parents’ world, and there was the rest. In the former, nostalgia ruled. It was defined by the altar that housed the photos of the dead, and the stacks of videotapes of Hong Kong soap opera and martial art films – dubbed into Vietnamese, of course. It is reinforced by the streams of relatives and old friends – many from Father’s ruling class – from the San José community that had become its own little world of exiles. I accepted its smallness and unchanging values, its old ways. It was to that world my parents retreated in retirement, and into which none of their American friends – people they ate lunch and went to the company picnic with, people to whom they generously gave birthday and baby shower cards and gifts – were allowed to trespass.
Each time I re-entered that world, I became less than I was, all small-talk and shared nostalgia; a tongue-tied Vietnamese son with limited vocabulary. I played the role the way one drives on an empty highway, with part of the brain shut off.
In my world, I thought of myself as free, but it was a foreign land my parents had no wish to visit. And because of that, it was as if a part of me would be lost forever.
I told myself it was out of love, out of respect, that I didn’t push for William to be included in their world and, except for one occasion when my car broke down at my parents’ home and he came by to pick me up, he never formally met them. He sometimes answered the phone when they called for me, but they remained consistently cold if infallibly polite. William, a cool and calm Englishman, a professor of the eighteenth-century novel, shrugged it off with wry humour: ‘Why, they’re just like my parents. Are you sure they’re not, by chance, from Hampstead?’
I apologised. He joked. ‘Mark my words, Ethan, I’ll have them wearing pink and giving you away at our wedding.’
If it was love at first sight for William, or something close to it, for me he was my port in a storm, my safe harbour. K had been gone for some years but in dreams, in reveries, vivid scenes of unspeakable tenderness kept surging from the deep. K was, for a long time, my own lost country, my own Waterloo. My best friend and lover moved far away and got married, had children, while I, in time, withdrew deep within. For way too many years I had felt like an exile and a somnambulist. I hadn’t noticed William because I barely noticed anyone, lost in my own abstraction, and in my work.
William is a firm believer in persistence – dinner in Half Moon Bay, brunch at the Ritz, Midsummer Night’s Dream at the ACT, a surprise office visit with a bento box and roses – and that it pays off, because when I emerged from what can only be described as a mist, there was this genuine and nice man who was, in his own way, very beautiful.
William, even if I wasn’t aware that I was in need of it, decided to rescue me.
* * *
‘I know, I know, I know you’re not gay. Trust me, I know. But David, if you were to pick one of us, hypothetically, hy-po-thetically, which one of us would you do?’
Sanjay, William’s best friend and colleague, is handsome and knows it; he has a tendency to be pushy, particularly when he is more than a little smitten.
‘Dude!’
‘Yes, dude, if you qualify as one, I mean,’ William said. ‘Leave him alone or I’ll tell your sweet Brahmin mother in Calcutta that you’ve been buggering seminary boys.’
Sanjay ignored him. ‘Come on, David. I’ll stake you a carton of Marlboro for your answer.’
‘Make it two.’
‘Fine. Two.’
David looked at William. ‘Him.’
William blushed. I blushed. Sanjay glared. Silence ensued.
‘Marlboro Lights, please.’
‘Why?’ Sanjay asked.
‘I’m trying to cut down on nicotine.’
‘Dumbass!’
‘Okay! Cuz the way he loves and takes care of Ethan.’
My heart skipped a beat. I felt William’s hand on mine. I leaned over and tongued him. David laughed.
‘I’m sooo … not happy,’ sighed Sanjay.
* * *
My sister was visiting with her husband and their baby. David dropped by in the middle of dinner, so we made room for him and he went to the kitchen and collected a bowl and chopsticks.
Mother, excited to have her daughter home and to hold her grandchild, was a little drunk on her Chardonnay and began talking. She and Father had been to dinner at Mr and Mrs Thu’s last week, she said. Their son, Francis, is marrying a man in Europe, another Vietnamese man, can you imagine? ‘I knew he was sick, but that was going overboard,’ she said in Vietnamese. ‘Can you possibly imagine? Both of them wore ao-dai dresses! Oh, they said they wept like they were at a funeral and not a wedding.’
Vietnamese often use the word ‘sick’ to mean ‘gay’. It was a word I rarely heard Mother use in that particular context as the topic rarely came up.
David was eating, but he stopped, chopsticks in mid-air, and in an even tone, with his mouth full, he said, ‘Gay people are not sick, Siu Mau. It’s unfair to William.’
Mother blanched. I could hear my sister next to me suck in her breath.
‘Huh,’ Father grunted. ‘Huh! Huh!’
It hadn’t occurred to me to protest. The word had always been used without a second thought and after a while I had learned to tune out.
Not David. David was angry, even if his voice was calm and his demeanour respectful. ‘Siu Mau. If William and Ethan are sick, there are not too many healthy people around either. I hope I am invited to their wedding next year.’
Mother sucked in her breath.
I glared at David; there was no wedding planned.
‘I agree with David,’ my sister said. ‘And thank you for saying that. Sick people are people who need medicine. Gay people are just gay people.’ She turned to me, put her hand on mine. ‘We never talk about this, but listen, Ethan. Congratulations. I would totally let William borrow my ao-dai dress, by the way, if you guys decide to tie the knot.’
My brother-in-law, a gentle Vietnamese man who never shared his opinion on much of anything, said ‘The baby’s crying. Excuse me.’
‘I feel a little sick,’ I said, aiming for levity.
‘Huh! Huh!’
‘Fine,’ Mother said. ‘I am just an unsophisticated woman. I didn’t mean to be…. Never mind, let’s not talk about it.’
‘Well,’ David said. ‘I think …’
‘Huh!’
‘It’s fine, David,’ I said. He had spoken in my defence and risked banishment if he said anything more. ‘Let’s talk about something else. But thank you.’
David looked at me and winked. He still had food in his mouth.
* * *
David graduated high school, which came as a surprise to more than a few of his detractors who didn’t know the influence Father had on his life (nor, for that matter, he had on ours), and with high enough grades to attend San José City College, something William literally begged him to do and for which we were prepared to pay. But his mind was set, and he joined the army. He believed it was his duty.
In the middle of his second tour, three weeks short of his twenty-first birthday, Specialist David Huan was killed in Basra. From what his younger brother and mother told us, and what was reported in the local papers, his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb. He and two other soldiers were killed. Shrapnel took out part of his jaw and his throat.
Father went into his study and slammed the door. Mother wept then proceeded to call everyone in the community to raise money for his funeral; David’s mother didn’t want the military anywhere near her boy.
My sister called and cried. She said she’d name her second baby David, if she had another one and he were a boy. ‘He was something else,’ she said. She had only met him twice. ‘Brave. I mean, fearless. He did things his way, you know.’
My mother did something I never thought I would ever see. She set up a little table with David’s photo in the middle, made his favourite dishes, then lit incense. She even went over to the Good-For-Yous and, with a bundle of roses, sweet-talked them for a basket of persimmons, which were
in season.
William wept in my arms.
The night before the funeral I watched a Jackie Chan movie with Father. In the middle, all flying kicks and lightning punches, I looked over and saw tears streaming from his eyes, which remained fixed on the TV. I gave him a box of Kleenex. ‘Huh!’ he rasped, and went to his study.
* * *
Sanjay and William were already at the funeral parlour, sitting at the back, when I brought in my parents. William said hello to Mother. She nodded politely.
Father’s old students surrounded him. A few even said ‘Hi Mister I-Break-Your-Neck’, but if it was meant to be funny, no one laughed. Instead, two young women hugged Father, and sobbed as if David had been his son.
There were dozens of older Vietnamese from the community in San José, three of them were from the old ARVN airborne division. Despite their bulging stomachs and grey hair, the men wore newly tailored and perfectly detailed uniforms, replete with red berets, and they saluted Father in unison. There were a handful of American vets from Iraq too, and, not completely unexpected, a few Chinese-Vietnamese gang members, David’s old posse.
Too distraught to speak, David’s mother, in a white ao-dai dress and white mourning headband, huddled between a few Vietnamese women and wept. Tom, his younger brother spoke only briefly before he, too, succumbed to grief and left the podium. There were a few letters from David’s comrades and his commander, all expressing their gratitude for his sacrifice and their admiration of his bravery.
Several young people spoke about David too, most notably one with a Chinese character Zhong – ‘Loyalty’ – tattooed on the nape of his neck and hooded eyes, who possessed a poet’s eloquence.
‘I want to say something about Dave, but I don’t have the words. I don’t think words can ever tell my sadness, and how much, how very much, I miss Dave. I think of the years – stretching now before me, and Dave not being in them – part of me has died.’
Apart from a stifled sniffle, a small cough or two, everyone was silent.
‘Every haunt I drive by – the old basketball court, the coffee shop on First and Santa Clara, that playground, even in my uneasy dreams – I can’t help but see his shadow everywhere,’ he said, and gathered himself, his hands gripping the sides of the podium.
‘I don’t know how I feel about this war, but I know this much: I would gladly have shielded him so that, dying, I could have the comfort of knowing the years ahead would be filled with Dave’s laughter.’
People wept. William sobbed.
David was awarded the Purple Heart, which now draped the large picture frame that housed his portrait. It had caught him in half smile, eyes sparkling, mischievous, as if trying hard not to laugh. Nothing about the face suggested death. But its vivaciousness stood in stark contrast to the closed casket enshrouded by the American flag behind it.
Father had been asked to give the formal eulogy. He began with the brick story, his warm and dignified voice, tinged with a dark Vietnamese accent. He called David ‘a patriot’, referred to him as ‘like my own son’, then observed, ‘David Huan died a soldier and a warrior.’ He talked of how David turned his life around and how he had made everyone very proud.
‘As a student, David Huan loved to tease, but he was also quick to defend …’ Father stopped, closed his eyes, his hands went up to his face, his shoulders shook. For a brief moment, I thought he would weep, but he quickly recovered. He went on to talk about how David protected weaker students from bullies, and how he pulled himself out of being near the bottom of the class to becoming one of his more exceptional students by the time he graduated.
‘David was a shining example of how young people are still idealistic and patriotic, and how Vietnamese in America prove their patriotism,’ Father said near the end. ‘We are willing to defend America against the threat of terrorism. Those young people in the audience should consider his fine example and think of what you can do for your country.’
That statement echoed in my head until it seeped into my blood and I felt hot, and angry. Barely conscious of what I was doing, I rose from my seat. Mother said, ‘You don’t have to. Father already spoke for us.’ I ignored her.
‘I wasn’t planning to speak today,’ I said, catching my breath at the podium. ‘But here’s what David Huan taught me: To be honest with yourself, and, therefore, true to others. Thirteen years younger than me, but he was far wiser and braver in so many respects.
‘He and I disagreed on the war, sometimes vehemently. I was against it from the start. I marched in protest. But I never doubted David’s patriotism. His need to protect and defend America seemed to me a natural extension of his need to protect his family and friends. So I deeply respect that.
‘But my Father, his former teacher, who taught him many good things, just now asked young people to consider following his footsteps. And I can’t hold my tongue. I am asking young people to think. Does patriotism always mean going to war?
‘Maybe patriotism is not always about blind obedience and loyalty. Maybe it means serious questioning about what’s right and wrong, about whether a war is just or not. Some of the most patriotic people I know, some of the bravest souls, speak for peace even at the risk of their jobs, their own safety.’
Some older Vietnamese started whispering to each other, and a couple of young people hissed. But I felt energised by their disapproval.
‘And here’s another thing on speaking up. David never hesitated to speak up, often in my defence. So I’m speaking up now.’ I stopped to breath. My heart was racing. Blood roared in my ears.
‘I was always taught that if you betray your family you have no honour. But there’s no honour in staying silent when you need to speak up. And there’s no honour in waging unjust wars based on a bunch of lies either, to be honest. And there’s no glory and heroism in death and dismemberment, only horror and suffering for those who survived. My father knows this. Too bad he didn’t share that with David, betting on the chance of him returning a hero to redeem for the war that he’d lost, and betting on the son he always wanted, rather than on the son he is ashamed of.’
Someone gasped and the audience began to talk at once in whispers. I went on.
‘Well. I’m gay and I’m anti-war. And David and I may not have seen eye to eye on everything, but I loved him like a brother. And I know he would be proud of me for speaking up, even if to disagree. He taught me that the world is what you make of it. He never let anything or anyone silence his tongue. He taught me that much.’
I couldn’t go on. I could feel their stares, their sympathy, their disapproval. I went to William and sat next to him. His eyes were red, but he was grinning. I held his hand. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.
There was nothing left to say after my performance, and the little crowd broke up with hugs and handshakes, and gossip – some watched me as I went through the crowd, but none would meet my eyes.
I drove my parents’ home. Father grunted. Mother sat in the back and sighed, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses.
‘You made us lose face …’ Father began.
‘You mean, I shamed you by being honest?’
‘Honest? Save your radical ideas. Why did you say that you are against the war? And that …’ He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
‘That what?’
‘Huh, huh …’
‘Madame Khai was there,’ Mother wailed almost to herself in English. ‘Tomorrow everyone, they know we are hippies!’
‘Mother,’ I looked into the rear-view mirror and snapped. ‘You are as much a hippy as I am a straight Republican.’
‘Huh! Huh!’
Mother started crying. It wasn’t clear whether it was because I was rude or what Madame Khai, Little Saigon’s biggest ‘haut parlour’ – loud speaker
– gossip – would be saying come the morrow. No one spoke for the rest of the ride.
* * *
I should have just dropped them off, driven home. I don’t know why I stayed. Perhaps I was hoping to have it out with them, to revisit the old battlefields. Perhaps I wanted them to acknowledge that they had at least heard what I had said. Perhaps I wanted them to see me as who I was in the larger world, to understand me, and see my wounds the way I had always seen theirs.
But now, in my parents’ living room, CNN a prattle of empty heads and Father outside by the pool practising his poomse and Mother chopping vegetables for dinner in the kitchen, I lost the will to fight. Instead, guilt plagued me and I felt sorry for changing my parent’s status in their small world.
A text message from William asked if I’d be home for dinner and I replied yes. But I sat and drank more of Father’s Chivas Regal and nibbled on dried squid and shrimp chips. Should I apologise? Or should I lecture them on the price of silence?
On CNN, a young Iraqi hugged himself as he wailed, eyes tight shut. It was something about a suicide bomber, twenty-four people killed in a Baghdad market, an unspecified number wounded.
I grabbed the remote and turned it off. Outside, Father was nearing the end of his exercise – arms blocking, knife-edged hand striking, elbow aiming for the face of his invisible opponent – ‘Arggh! Arhgh!’
I hadn’t bothered to really look at him for some time. His remaining hair had turned mostly grey. Age spots marked his dark, thin face. And his bony body seemed a minor version of the robust man I knew as a child. His movements were restricted, lacking power – they seemed now a parody, or at best, a gingerly attempt, to relive once more that irretrievable past. When did he age so much?
A few more minutes and Father was done. He bowed and went back inside, passing me without a word.
It was near dusk. The sun had gone behind the neighbour’s roof and the air was cool and supple. I leaned against the house and lit a cigarette. David, wherever he was, must have gotten a kick out of Ethan’s coming out at his goodbye party, stealing a bit of his thunder. I laughed.
It was then that I saw it. Out the corner of my eye, a movement, a flash of … something. I turned. A mangy fox stood staring at me, its tongue hanging out. It was neither afraid nor surprised. If anything it had an expression of, and I surely must have been imagining this, bemusement.
Then it was gone, behind a pile of bricks and through the space under the fence and into the Good-For-Yous’ garden.
I’d never sighted a fox in the area before and by the time I reached the fence it was nowhere to be seen. At my feet were the bricks, some broken, some intact, and yellow daffodils had grown between and around them. It took me a few seconds before I realised they had belonged to David. Father had taught him how to break them – David had broken two each time, before he enlisted.
Over the bricks hung a branch of the persimmons. With the fallen fruit scattered about, the whole thing looked oddly like a little shrine.
I gathered some of the least damaged fruit and piled it on top of the bricks and, after a few drags of my cigarette, wedged it between them. I sat down cross-legged and watched the smoke waft in the wind. I thought then of the sadness in William’s eyes even as he laughed, and David’s smirk and Mother’s obsessive cleaning and Father’s look of betrayal when he saw me and K kissing, betrayal that followed from the disappointment and shock. And K’s silent eyes, the last time we made love, before he drove away and out of my life.
I was barely aware of what I was doing. I placed two bricks side by side and a third across the top. In the twilight, the breeze turned colder and the air smelled of petals and cut grass. I did not focus on breaking the brick. I did not take a stance. But before my hand descended I heard wry William admonishing me: ‘Empathy should only go so far, Ethan. Please, for God’s sake, don’t drink and drive your hand into bricks.’ I could see blood drip onto grass. I could hear bones breaking. I resisted the urge to hurt myself and dropped to my knees and wept.
The past, irretrievable, continues to own us. But how long has it been since I struggled to break free?
Part of me was rushing forward. Part of me needed to laugh at my own stupidity. I could break all my bones and there would never be understanding between me and my father. But when I opened my mouth to respond to William’s imagined admonishment, I retched and, amid mother’s well-trimmed rose bushes, began to repudiate the remnants of my inheritance.
