Love Like Hate, page 7
“What is this?”
“Crab soup with bamboo shoots, ma’am.”
“You know I hate canned bamboo shoots!”
“You always liked it before, ma’am.”
“And this crab stinks. Is it spoiled?”
“No, of course not. I can add some sesame oil, if you like.”
“Please take it away and let me sleep.”
The war kept up its intensity and Hoang Long had to skip his leave a few times. In 1971, he came home just twice and had to cut short his stay both times. “You must understand,” he explained to his worried wife, “I cannot be away from my men at a time like this.” In June 1971, as Hoang Long was fighting in Long Khanh, Kim Lan went to Hung Vuong Hospital to give birth to a boy weighing just four pounds. She named him Cun.
Cun resembled a naked mole rat at birth and would go on to resemble a naked mole rat for the rest of his life. When his teeth started to sprout, he even bit his mom several times a day. He also liked to bite other children and pinch them, especially on the inner thighs. He cried all day and night and rejected whatever his mom fed him—carrots, peas, pap or pabulum. Disagreeing with all baby formulas, he refuted both milk and soy, spat out Good Start and threw up the Dutch Girl. Exasperated, Kim Lan went to a medicine man and got a red string with a black bead to tie around Cun’s neck. This was supposed to calm him down but she saw zero improvement in her son’s mood or behavior. As Cun grew a little older, he never passed up an opportunity to yank an animal’s tail or ear or squash anything that could be squashed. If he saw a live crab, he would immediately sever its antennae and wait impatiently for an eye to stick out so he could pinch it and roll it between his fingers.
When Hoang Long came home for Christmas of 1971, he saw Cun for the first time. He was so disappointed he could not even feign a smile. This has to be the ugliest baby ever, he shook his head. Could this be someone else’s child? Has she been screwing around with some of these losers loitering in the café? Look at how she banters with them, always laughing and giggling. A married woman shouldn’t be giggling with strangers. But as he looked more closely at the horrible mouse child, he noticed that the smirking mouth was unmistakably his own.
Kim Lan could clearly see her husband’s discomfort toward Cun. More troubling to her, however, was the fact that he was not wearing his wedding ring. She had never seen him without his ring. Even odder, the skin where the ring should be didn’t appear any lighter. His entire finger was uniformly brown. She was about to say something, but for some reason, unclear even to herself, she decided to let it pass. On his next leave, he was wearing his ring again.
Kim Lan also noticed that her husband seemed more tired yet more restless with each visit. He didn’t take her out to restaurants like he used to. “I just want to stay home,” he said. “It’s so nice just to be home. I don’t want to deal with the noise and the glares and looking at people stuffing their faces. It disgusts me to see people laughing and eating in a restaurant. People in Saigon act as if there’s no war going on. All the restaurants and movie theaters are filled with hippie draft dodgers in bell-bottom pants!”
“Why don’t we go to the zoo then? It’d give Cun a chance to see the animals.”
“All he’ll see there are the freaks! The zoo has been taken over by hippies!”
“How do you know? You haven’t been there since before we got married. Remember how we used to take long romantic walks through the zoo?”
Hoang Long simply closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and sighed. The phrase “long romantic walks” had apparently upset some chemical balance in him. Kim Lan understood Hoang Long’s irritation with hippies—she hated them, too—but her husband was hardly home when he was at home. He barely dealt with her at all. Instead of talking to his wife, he spent most of his time watching TV, either the American station showing Bonanza, I Love Lucy, or Bewitched, or folk opera, news, or sports on the Vietnamese channel. Instead of eating with a bowl and chopsticks at the table, he preferred his food on an individual plate, so he could eat and watch TV at the same time. He loved his sixteen-inch Fuji black and white, with its long, splaying legs and side-closing doors. It was the centerpiece of the house. He never played with his son. If Cun was making too much noise, he would snap, “Get this kid to shut up, will you?” Once, as he was watching soccer and Cun was crying, he even yelled, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll smack your face!”
“Is that a way to talk to your son?” Kim Lan protested.
“Burma is ahead by a goal,” Hoang Long replied, all tense, his body hunched up in front of the TV, five empty bottles of beer on the floor next to his chair. “Be quiet!”
At halftime, seeing that she was angry, he patted her on the butt and joked, “That kid is nothing but a screaming and shitting machine!”
Chopping onions, she had her head turned away from him, and did not respond.
“Chopping onions again, huh?” He sighed, suppressing a burp. “What are you making?”
Again she did not respond. They stood an inch apart, his hot breath fanning her upper arm. Seeing her knife starting to tremble, he shook his head, grabbed another beer and went back to the TV. Cun had passed out from crying. Is it that time of the month? he wondered. There is plenty of time left. We can still come back. It’s not over until it’s over.
Burma was ranked sixty-seventh in the world in 1973, South Vietnam eighty-second, and the match ended three to two in Burma’s favor. All of Saigon groaned at the final whistle. Some bettors lost their houses that day. Crouching in their dark tunnels or lying on hammocks under triple-canopied jungles, the Vietcong also groaned, their ears glued to American-made radios. Away from home, from civilization, at war, horny and nostalgic, there was no better friend than your radio. There were rumors among them that the ARVN had a piss-seeking missile. This American military dream weapon could sniff out urea from the sky. To piss against tree or bush was to flirt with eternity, insist on nirvana. It was only safe to urinate into bodies of water. The guerrillas placed a bucket of piss out in the open as a decoy and, sure enough, it was immediately zapped by a piss-seeking missile.
The guerrillas had their own ingenious weapons. They fashioned booby traps out of bamboo, mud, beach chairs and beer cans. They smeared human shit onto punji stakes to cause deadly infection. They even catapulted beehives at their enemy. (The rumor about Americans shooting flash-frozen bees from air guns was absolutely not true. Hurled through the warm tropical air, the bees were supposed to revive to sting the enemy.)
Drunk and reeling from the loss to Burma, Hoang Long reflected that, short of war, nothing triggered more collective euphoria or despair than the final score of a game. Yet nothing was more meaningless or ephemeral, its dubious significance erased with the result of the very next match. The next day, Vietnam defeated Laos five to one, Sheffield United undressed and humiliated Arsenal five to zero, and the Red Sox edged the Orioles two to one. A defeat in sport was merely a symbolic death, just as death was merely symbolic so long as it happened to somebody else.
Hoang Long had never kissed Kim Lan before, but now he didn’t even hug her. He had called call her “honey” and “sweetie,” but now his endearment for her was “your mother,” as in “Your mother take care, OK?” as he walked out the door.
8 THE TRUTH
In truth, it wasn’t Kim Lan who had been screwing around, but Hoang Long. He had not shown up for some of his leaves because he wanted to spend time with his mistress in Cao Lanh. Though not as pretty as Kim Lan, she was also a nurse, younger and not pregnant. Clearly, Hoang Long had a thing for very young nurses. One benefit of the war was that it allowed a man to be in two places at the same time. If the war ended, Hoang Long would have to dump one of the two women.
This young nurse could screw like a pro. In fact, she was sort of a pro, a semipro. Though she never accepted cash for sex, men had to bring her expensive gifts. Hoang Long unwrapped a National rice cooker one time. Another time, a gold-plated Seiko watch with embossed leather band. For four nights of lovin’, it wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it. The young nurse had a drawerful of Citizens, Seikos and Bulovas, so many she couldn’t sell them fast enough. She only stayed a nurse because she liked the white uniform and because she really cared about people—she had a gold-plated heart.
Hoang Long thought of the stiff, almost comical way his wife yielded to his sexual advances at home. While most people arrived at spousal sexual ennui two or three years into marriage, necessitating weird videos and training manuals, Hoang Long and Kim Lan had achieved it instantly. My wife is still a sexual innocent after all these years, he thought, and she will always be a sexual innocent. My wife is unsuitable for sex.
My mistress gives me something my wife can’t … is not equipped to give me, is constitutionally incapable of giving me. She was made to be a good wife and she is certainly that, but I need something more. A soldier’s existence is already abnormal, so I need abnormal solutions to go with it. When I’m with my mistress, I feel compensated, at last, for all the shit I go through. She makes love joyously. Screaming and laughing, she challenges me. I feel born again when I’m with my mistress. Lying next to her, I am no longer a bloodstained man but a freshly washed newborn. Her fragrant sweat cleans all that filthy blood from my body. Without her, my anger and hatred would turn me into a monster. I’d probably have killed my wife already if it wasn’t for my mistress. I’d kill everybody if it wasn’t for my mistress. Isn’t it enough that I risk death every day to support my family? Don’t I have a right to enjoy myself once in while? One week of pleasure for eleven weeks of hell is fair compensation, don’t you think?
Hoang Long always took off his wedding ring before visiting his mistress. He took it off and on so often, he nearly lost it a few times. When he did wear it, it pinched his finger. Either the damn ring has shrunk, he thought, or else my finger has gotten much fatter. Blocking my circulation, it’s liable to give me gangrene. Soon I’ll have to chop that goddamned finger off!
9 NIXON IN CHINA
When Richard Nixon visited China in February 1972, he effectively ended the Vietnam War. With this rapprochement, Vietnam became a dispensable pawn. In January of 1974, Chinese warships sailed through the US Seventh Fleet to seize a handful of South Vietnamese islands. If China had waited until after the Fall of Saigon to grab them, it would have been stealing from its own allies, the North Vietnamese. In any case, the end of South Vietnam was near.
In 1974, Hoang Long came home only once, just for Tet. He spent his other three leaves intertwined with his mistress in Cao Lanh. His techniques had improved much over the years—he had a more diversified sexual portfolio now—but his wife was never the beneficiary. He brought a stack of money home as usual, which allowed them to buy a fridge, rebuild the kitchen and add a second floor to their house. It had become one of the better-looking homes in the neighborhood. Saigon has always been a city where the few building codes are routinely ignored. Houses grow haphazardly, ulcerously, according to their owners’ fluctuating incomes and whims. Every Vietnamese is certainly not a poet, as is commonly claimed, but he’s likely to be an architect—and a postmodern one at that. He will not hesitate to order a contractor to add Greek columns, Roman arches, or a Russian dome to his home. Few people moved to a better neighborhood simply because most neighborhoods were basically the same: a mishmash of fine homes, rising up to six stories, interspersed with shacks.
The inevitable finally happened in the spring of 1975. Hue and Da Nang fell to the North Vietnamese in March. On April 3, Nha Trang fell after a battle lasting just three hours. On April 8, the presidential palace in Saigon was bombed by a renegade ARVN pilot, twenty-six-year-old Nguyen Thanh Trung, whose name actually meant “loyal.” He later claimed to have been a Vietcong mole from the beginning. If this was true, then he had dropped hundreds of bombs on his own comrades over his three years as a combat pilot. A mass murderer and, in some ways, a poet, he had sacrificed thousands of lives to make a single symbolic statement in the end. Of the four bombs he unloaded that day, two landed in the garden, two on the roof, causing one injury.
Also on April 8, the deputy commander of the Saigon area, General Nguyen Van Hieu, was found shot to death in his office, likely murdered by another ARVN officer. The bullet entered his left chin and exited the right top of his head, an impossible angle for a right-handed man to commit suicide. On April 9, the North Vietnamese attacked Xuan Loc, a town only thirty-seven miles northeast of Saigon. Outnumbered four to one, southern forces nevertheless held on for two weeks. Losing two thousand men, they destroyed thirty-seven North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tanks and killed over five thousand of the attackers. Their commander, General Le Minh Dao, would later spend seventeen years in a Communist reeducation camp. On April 21, President Thieu resigned on TV after a speech denouncing the US for abandoning South Vietnam. “The United States has not kept its promises. It is inhumane. It is untrustworthy. It is irresponsible.” US aid to South Vietnam had fallen from a peak of thirty billion dollars a year to one billion by 1974. The humiliation of a minor country is that it is always at the mercy of a major one. A major power distorts everything in its path. A major power distorts the world. Thieu rose to prominence after a CIA-engineered coup that ousted Ngo Dinh Diem. Under Thieu, South Vietnam’s military was compromised by his preference for loyal officers over competent ones. He was strangely paranoid about military coups engineered by the CIA. After his speech, Thieu fled to Taiwan, then flew to London a few months later. By 1990 he was living in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Kim Lan had always admired Nguyen Van Thieu, not for his policies, but because he had a high forehead, a sign of intelligence, and long ears, indicating longevity. He had a round face with a well-defined jaw—the face of a leader—unlike his main rival, Nguyen Cao Ky, who resembled a cricket with a mustache.
The North Vietnamese started shelling Tan Son Nhat Airport on April 28. On April 30, their tanks rolled into Saigon. It was a clear, bright day, with the temperature nearing one hundred. On many streets lay the hastily discarded uniforms, boots and weapons of the defeated army. In front of an ugly black statue in a public square, a white-uniformed cop lay dead, a jagged hole violating his right temple, his dark blood pooling, lumpy with bits of neurons, synapses and memories, a man’s colorful life translated into gray matter, his capsized hat, rocked by the wind, lying beside him. A solitary ant rammed its head repeatedly against the spreading blood, trying to cross. Kim Lan hadn’t heard from Hoang Long for nearly a month and had no idea where he was. She had prepared for the worst by stocking up on rice, sugar, cooking oil and instant noodles. The café had been closed for a week and the servant had gone home. Thousands of people with connections and/or luck had already left the country. With Cun on her lap, she sat next to a radio to follow the latest developments. Minutes after Duong Van Minh announced his unconditional surrender, shocking millions of people around the world, someone shook her steel gate. Are the North Vietnamese at my door already?! The rattling persisted even more violently, accompanied by a male voice yelling her name over and over, but it wasn’t her husband’s. She went to look and saw that it was Sen.
“Sen, what are you doing here?!”
“I came to get you!”
“What do you mean you came to get me?”
“I came to get you and your son. I have the means to leave the country. Listen, we don’t have much time. I can drive us to Vinh Chau. From there we can take a boat to leave the country.”
“What about my husband?”
“He’s probably out already. Or maybe they’ve caught him. Listen, we don’t have much time. If you stay here, they’ll kill you. You should leave with me now, and meet up with your husband later.”
“But I can’t take off with you. I have a husband!”
“I’m just offering you the means to escape, Kim Lan. I have no other intentions. You should come with me for the sake of your son. Everybody else is escaping.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t leave with you.” And with that, she slammed the steel gate in Sen’s face.
10 A JAILED DEMOCRAT
The first week after the Fall of Saigon, Kim Lan stayed inside. She and Cun ate instant noodles and ignored whatever was happening outside. The usual sounds did not filter in—radio music, kids playing, the wooden clappers of soup-delivery boys. She took out old magazines and read them cover to cover, knowing the society depicted in them no longer existed. She stared at photos of famous singers—Hung Cuong, Thanh Thuy, Che Linh—and wondered if they were still inside the country. She read an article about Vo Van Bay, a tennis star who had won twenty Davis Cup matches before he retired. She read about an African king who returned to Saigon to look for a daughter he had fathered in 1953 while serving in the French Army. He found her working in a cement factory and took her to his kingdom of the Central African Republic. A photo showed a grim man, crowned, robed and holding a scepter, sitting on a huge throne in the shape of an eagle, its wings spreading, but there was no image of the fortunate daughter. Her real name was Martine, but she had to change it to Mai to blend in at the cement factory. Kim Lan had seen this factory many times, going to Bien Hoa, and never suspected an African princess was wasting away behind its gray cement walls. It was a colossal thing on the left just after you crossed the Newport Bridge, before you hit the National Cemetery. Everyone knew this cement factory. Lost in a particularly fascinating article, Kim Lan sometimes forgot, if only for a few seconds, that her world had been irrevocably changed. She often slowed the pace of her reading, as if by doing that, she was slowing the pace of time itself, making the night, her last refuge, last a little longer. But there would be no king or father to deliver her from her situation. She oscillated between apocalyptic foreboding and willful optimism. Each night, she stood at the altar to pray to the Goddess of Mercy to protect her missing husband. She was nearly certain he was dead, but somehow this prospect did not sadden or alarm her—she simply felt numb. Whatever his faults, Hoang Long had given her years of relative calm and happiness. As his wife, she had matured, and for that she was grateful. Lying in bed, she squeezed Cun tightly to her bosom, their bodies welded together, inseparable, and felt strangely secure, as if no danger could detect or devour them as long as they remained on the darkened bed, as if the glare of morning would never come. In the stillness of the night, the world felt safe and eternal and nothing seemed changed.
