The Eaves of Heaven (22 page)

As her firstborn, I led the funeral procession out of the Ancestral Gate. It was difficult walking backward in the mud. I kept slipping and falling, holding up the whole column of marchers, monks, relatives, friends, and servants. My white mourner’s robe was completely brown. I struggled to perform the funeral rites—the same one Tan had done for his father. I walked backward in front of the casket bearers. I stopped, knelt, pressed my forehead into the mud, and cried:
Please, don’t leave us, Mother. We are lost without you. Please, stay and watch over us. We love you. We need you. Please, don’t leave us, Mother.

When the coffin reached me, I rose, took ten steps back, knelt down, and repeated the pleas.

Towed by their nannies, Hung and Hong wailed. Cousin Tan was walking next to his stepmother, head down, sobbing into his chest. He was closer to my mother than to his stepmothers, Aunt Thuan and Aunt Lang. The rest of the household followed behind as we went out of the estate. Villagers lined the road to pay their respects. The peasants adored her—the soft-spoken outsider from another province.

I lost my sandals and cap. I was covered in slime, mud in my mouth and the hot smell of earth in my nostrils. A heavy sun. The villagers, my childhood friends, my relatives, the monks, the servants, the heady incense, the mourning chants, the cymbals and tolling bells. Nothing could fill the hollowness within me.

We came to a crossroad. To the left was the dirt path to our Ancestral Cemetery in the village—a modest park enclosed by a low brick wall, with a few trees and stone benches where Uncle Thuan rested with his forefathers. Places for Father and Mother had already been chosen long ago.

If I walked straight ahead, I would come to the interprovincial road that led back to Mother’s ancestral home. Her family had a splendid cemetery there, much nicer than my father’s family’s. It was a beautiful flower garden with statues, gravel footpaths, trees, and a fishpond, all enclosed by a high wall and tended year-round by a caretaker. Former senators and mandarins and village chiefs of her line had been laid to rest there. She would have been among family.

To the right, in the middle of a rice field, lay the plot Aunt Thuan had picked out for Mother. During Mother’s wake, the Aunties had a monk augur the family’s fortunes. In the tea leaves and chicken bones, he predicted dangers ahead, so the Aunties summoned a feng shui master who said that the estate was exposed to ill elements from the north, and that if they buried Mother in the northern field, the estate would be protected from evil. I protested, but they would not hear of it. Auntie Thuan said Mother’s spirit had the duty of safe-keeping the household. As head of the clan, she had the right to decide my mother’s resting place.

My knees buckled. I couldn’t make the turn. I couldn’t lead them to that grave, the lone mound of red earth in a blue paddy-sea of sky. Crumpling in the mud, I was useless. I opened my mouth, but no words came. Dry sobs seized my throat. The bearers stopped, the shadow of her casket falling on me. Guards Canh and Khi pulled me to my feet and walked me backward down the path the Aunties had chosen.

The monks chanted and the bearers lowered her into the ground. Aunties burned paper chariots, fake money, and gold foil to send Mother’s spirit to heaven in comfort. I wondered if water would get into her casket. I could not stop shaking.

I
STUDIED
as I had never done before. I bent my entire being into the text, poring over the equations and chapters as if Mother were in her garden, waiting for me to pass the exam. Within the pages, I could pretend that nothing had changed, that Father was safe in Hanoi, and that things would return to normal soon. My escape portal was through literature, history, and mathematics. The tighter my focus, the easier the texts became. In grief, I discovered my mental stride. Learning was transformed into an act of pleasure. It was Mother’s last gift, her wish for me to love the quest for knowledge.

Week after week, I stayed in our house, ate meals the cook set out for my brothers and me, and avoided the Aunties. Boyhood games lost their hold on me. I stopped going into the village. My friend Hoi came and urged me to join the Resistance and avenge my mother. He did not know that I blamed the war for everything and that I loathed both the Resistance and the French. I told him that I had promised my mother I would finish school.

I
TOOK
the exam. When the results came back, I had the highest score in the district. I told no one and brought my grade card to Mother’s garden. Her rosebush had grown wild with blooms. The birds were absent. Mother would have been thirty-two the next month, this poor woman who had shed more tears than laughter in the brief time I had known her. I sat beneath the guava tree and thought of Mother and her smiling eyes. The stone marker was still there, beneath it our secret promise as fresh as the day we had committed it to the earth.

THE NORTH
1948–1949

27. T
HE
S
LAVE

It happened at the apex of his life; he was thirty-one, in his prime, a country nobleman at large in the city with the riches of generations at his disposal. It happened on a journey home to see his pregnant wife. He had stopped midway to spend the night at the estate of his cousin-in-law. The next morning, a French patrol passed through the village, looking for guerrillas. Warned by scouts, most of the village men, regardless of political affiliation, had fled with their sisters and daughters. French forces were known to plunder and rape villages suspected of harboring rebels.

They herded a handful of elders, cripples, drunkards, and one oversleeper into the courtyard of the community temple. Three captives were shot on suspicion of being Viet Minh sympathizers. When they put a gun to the man in the silk pajamas, he protested in fluent French, claiming to be the brother of the late magistrate of the Pham Domain in Tong Xuyen, candidate apparent to that seat and sworn enemy of the Viet Minh.

It amused the soldiers. For the colonialists, native nobility was merely a convenience. The French commander was delighted. He had lost his interpreter to a sniper’s bullet and was in dire need of a replacement. Dismissing the man’s identifications and promise of a cash reward, the commander shackled him in his silk pajamas to the line of coolies.

Within months, his wife would die and take with her the secret burial site of the vast ancestral fortune.

The nobleman’s new life began as a colonial slave. His lineage, wealth, education—even his family’s long-standing obedience to France—didn’t save him the indignity of being led from village to village on a chain. He was fed when he worked, whipped when he refused. No more than a useful piece of equipment or a whore, he was handed from one commander to the next, pressed into one tour after another in an endless series of raids and battles staged across the expanse of the Red River Delta. They gave him no respite and paid him no wages. On the march, he was a pack animal for the regiment’s supplies. In the villages, he was an interpreter of French demands and threats. He translated the interrogator’s questions and penned homesick letters for illiterate legionnaires.

The scorching sky turned rainy, then wintry; the campaign dragged across a full year. Once the old colonial masters had retrenched themselves, the coolies, the cooks, the errand boys, and the strange interpreter—the learned barbarian well-versed in Voltaire—were unshackled and released back to the land. Freedom was their compensation.

My father returned to us, a barefoot beggar with neither a bedroll on his back nor a single piaster in his pocket. As raw-boned and light-shadowed as the famine victims that once roamed the land, he staggered through the Ancestral Gate, sunburned and covered in bleeding scabs. No one dared touch him. Lice lined the collar of his shirt and nested in the stitching of his pants.

Few men had fallen a greater distance.

The house guards bowed, eyes lowered, reluctant to look upon his debasement. He seized his youngest son in a crushing embrace and wept. The boy could not recognize his father and wailed in terror on the steps of the family temple. Servants gathered round and bowed. The head of the clan had returned from the dead.

That evening, I walked him to Mother’s grave. We kneeled down in the bed of gardenias and lit incense. We brought Mother her guavas and green mangoes from the garden she loved so much. Father was bent over, his newly shaven head in his hands. He was talking to her, face as wet as rain, hands shaking as I had never seen them shake before.

I left him by her graveside, for the first and last time.

The sunset sky had turned upside down in the autumn paddies, and he was afloat on her island of flowers, engulfed by the burning eaves of heaven.

THE SOUTH
1971–1973

28. A L
ULL OF
S
ILENCE

I
t was the summer of 1971. It seemed unreal to me that Tan and I had not seen each other for ten years. We ran into each other at the fountain square on Duy Tan Street, just a few months before the Americans started pulling out from Vietnam. Anh and I were on our way to the park at the center of Saigon for ice cream. The children were at home with their nanny. Tan had just gotten out from his classes at the law school across the street. He was dressed smartly in a civilian suit, already looking the part of a worldly lawyer. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, he had developed into a modern image of his father. Since his decommission, Tan worked for an American company maintaining U.S. fighter planes and was attending evening classes for his law degree.

“Are you all right, Thong?” Tan asked, squeezing my shoulder. “You look very thin and tired.”

“Really? I’m in the best shape of my life. I was very lucky with my second tour. It was only a year and a half. They stationed me here in Saigon to train the City Civil Defense Force. If they sent me to the front again, I doubt I’d still be alive. I just got released last year.”

“Me too.”

At last, South Vietnam appeared to be secure. The failed 1968 Tet Offensive had been a major setback for North Vietnam. The NLF suffered heavy casualties because they were used as the main force to attack the cities. Their underground was also exposed and decimated. In the following year, the U.S. took the offensive, hoping to force Hanoi to the negotiation table. By 1969, the impact of the Tet campaign, which had come close to toppling the government of the South, was largely forgotten. Confident that peace was forthcoming, the U.S. cut aid to South Vietnam. With the apparent stability and a shortfall in the budget, the government reduced its armed forces. Old army reservists like myself were decommissioned once more, and senior regulars like Tan were retired.

It didn’t seem unreasonable for us to expect a peaceful future. Tan no longer worried about being sent to some remote airfield where shelling occurred nightly. I no longer dreaded the prospect of being assigned to a combat unit. Tan was planning a career in law. I had a tenured teaching position and owned a house.

“It’s really good to see you,” he said.

I smiled. “Very good to see you too.”

We were standing beside the fountain, grasping each other’s forearms. There was no need to say more. I had missed him. Time had swung away from us. We were closer than brothers. Our roots were entwined since birth. As boys, we had shared the same bed, eaten from the same bowl, gone to the same school. Our adolescent fears, shames, and thrills came from the same page. Between us lay all the secrets and pains that were ours alone. It was a profound comfort to know Tan was alive and well.

“We should go somewhere for a drink and celebrate,” Anh said.

Tan turned to her and grinned. “My apartment is just around the corner from here. Would you like to see it? I’ve got a small bar.”

It was getting dark. The streetlights came on. People emerged to stroll in the cool evening air. Couples lingered around the little squares, chatting and laughing. Vendors selling snacks, drinks, barbecued meats, and noodles lined the sidewalk.

Tan lived in a new luxurious high-rise. We took the elevator up to the seventh floor, well above the treetops. His modern one-bedroom apartment was as spacious as a top-notch hotel suite. Anh squeaked with delight. One of her wonderful qualities was that she was always genuinely happy to see someone else succeed. She peered out one window after another, telling Tan what gorgeous views he had. She skipped around the apartment, excited as though it were ours. Beaming with pleasure, he recounted every feature of his lavishly furnished home. He showed her his brand-new hi-fi stereo system and television. There was everything a man could want in a bachelor’s pad.

It occurred to me then that perhaps his life was rather lonely. Our paths had diverged. Tan had amassed a life of material comfort and pleasures. I had created a family for myself. He had known, possibly, hundreds of women. I’d been with only one. The influences from our formative years, like minor deflections at the beginning of a long trajectory, had borne significant consequences.

Tan opened his refrigerator. The shelves were stacked tightly with Coca-Cola and Budweiser. Anh went outside and brought up some street-foods: stir-fried cubed steak, sweet-smoked fish, peanuts, and ice cream. Tan asked about the family. I was surprised he hadn’t visited them more often. Somehow, through all these years, I believe he still considered himself an orphan. Being around the family only made him lonelier.

I told him the family had never been better. Hung and Hong had both graduated from college. Hung was a high school teacher, Hong a department manager of the Forestry Service. Hoang was in the police academy, and Hien was in his last year of high school. The three sisters, Huong, Hang, and Hanh, were in school. They kept things going smoothly at home and took good care of Father. My youngest stepbrother, Hau, was the same age as my first son, An. After selling lottery tickets on the street corner under the full brunt of the sun, Stepmother finally had her own ticket kiosk and was doing well. Hung, Hong, and I had rebuilt the house for them. Father, however, had never made the slightest attempt to free himself from opium.

Inevitably, the conversation strayed to the good old days: the foods we ate in Hanoi, the playground fights, our youthful games and pranks. We ran out the evening on only the pleasant memories. When it was late, Anh took the car key and went home to relieve the nanny. Tan poured us another round of beer. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder, grinning. The view from his sofa was spectacular, Saigon spreading out like a big garden; city lights and neon signs winking through the tree boughs.

From here, it was easy to discount the bad news in the papers, the rising anti-American sentiments in the countryside, the reports about American bombing campaigns indiscriminately wiping out whole villages, and the wanton spraying of dangerous Agent Orange that was poisoning the peasants and their land. Just a few hundred miles north of Saigon, huge tracts of lush land—thousands of acres—had been reduced to parched scrub plains in order to deprive the VC of cover. It was unimaginable to read in the newspapers that Vietnam, the rice basket of Asia, had to import rice from America to feed its people. All that seemed far away from us. Perhaps we didn’t want to believe it. I had worked indirectly for USAID, and Tan worked for the Americans. We were too intent on our own survival, eager to at last have a chance to live and plan our lives.

“Do you plan to go back to school?” Tan asked.

“Of course, after we’ve settled down a bit. I have five kids, the youngest barely a year old.”

Tan nodded. “That’s good, because I don’t think you’ll be happy as a high school teacher.”

His disappointment was palpable. Tan knew how much I wanted to be a professor. He did not expect me to end up as a second-tier high school teacher.

“You’re right. I haven’t had much time to think about a career. Eight years in the army with a family to care for, you don’t think of much else other than getting out alive.”

Sensing my discomfort, he changed the subject. “Do you think there will be peace soon?”

It struck me as comical that this had become our lifelong concern. When will we have peace? I chuckled. “It’s never for us to decide, is it?”

Tan leaned back into the sofa and cocked his feet on the coffee table. I noticed that his posture had been Americanized, as had his taste for décor. There was more of a swagger and bigness about him. It suited Tan. I was happy for him. Someday he would become a judge like his father. Uncle Thuan would have been proud of his son.

He said, “The Americans I work with think the peace negotiations might bring some changes to the South Vietnam regime. The Communists are drained after their Tet Offensive. They’re willing to negotiate now. There could be peace soon.”

“If Minh wins, I think we will have peace. Even my father supports Minh and, you know, my father hasn’t said a single good thing about Diem, Thieu, Ky, or their cronies.”

Duong Van Minh was a famous figure who had led the junta that overthrew Diem in 1963. He had the support of powerful Buddhist and Catholic leaders. People saw him as an honorable man, a character capable of negotiating a peaceful end to the war. The NLF even mobilized a campaign to get out the vote for Minh and made him very popular in the countryside. However, Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of Defense, distrusted Minh.

Tan grimaced. “If the Americans allow a fair election, Minh will win. But I don’t think that will happen. Thieu used the Americans to eliminate Ky from the race.”

With the help of the CIA and the U.S. embassy, Thieu had already rigged the election by bribing the legislature with CIA money to pass a law effectively barring Ky’s candidacy.

I sighed. “Minh has to win. It’s the only peaceful way.”

“I hope you’re right.”

W
E
never got the chance to vote for Minh.

After discovering Thieu’s plot with the province chiefs to defraud the electoral process, Minh went to the U.S. embassy seeking assurances that the Americans would follow through on their promise of forcing their man, Thieu, to allow a “reasonably” open election. The embassy refused, and Minh withdrew his candidacy.

Faced with the embarrassment of having their candidate running in a “democratic” one-man race, the Americans offered Minh millions to stay in the election, but he declined to lend his name to the charade. The Americans convinced Thieu to reverse the rules and allow Ky to run in the election, but Ky refused.

So Thieu ran alone and took 94.3 percent of the vote.

Although talks were held, Hanoi never made another serious attempt at the peace negotiation. Vietnam had lost its best chance for peace. The war would continue, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the sufferings of millions of Vietnamese.

A
S
ordinary citizens, we were oblivious to the details of high-level machinations. But as we had expected with Thieu entrenched in the presidency, there was more fighting. Life did not get any easier. Unemployment and inflation worsened rapidly. Over the next two years, Tan and I kept in touch. We were nervous about the future.

I often came to Tan’s apartment to find out what his American colleagues were saying. As usual, we sat in his sofa and drank Budweiser, staring out his panoramic window. We talked about a recent newspaper story about how the salary of an ARVN soldier wasn’t enough to support a family of four for half a month.

“What’s happening to the economy? I’m getting poorer by the month,” I said. My teaching salary, once adequate for supporting my family, now could only cover a small fraction of our budget. Inflation was outstripping workers’ wages.

Tan said, “Whatever it is, our own leaders know about it. Don’t you see every single one of them trying to steal and rob the country as much as he can, as quickly as he can?”

I shrugged, having grown indifferent to politics and corruption—they had become synonymous to me. “Corruption has been a disease since Diem’s regime. I don’t see much change.”

“Are you blind? It has gotten much worse lately. Before they were just milking the cow and stealing the cream. Now, they’re butchering it.”

“Yes, I know, but that doesn’t mean something big is going to happen. This is the most peace Saigon has had in years.”

Tan shook his head morosely, staring out the window. “It makes me nervous seeing the top leaders blatantly ransacking the country. They don’t seem worried about their political careers. They must know something we don’t.”

It had been a long time, but I still recognized that anxious, piercing look on his face. It was disconcerting. Tan had the premonitions of a survivor. Orphaned as a child, he had become a keen observer of the world. He could discern patterns where I found none. I had often resented that and accused him of being a pessimist, but looking back, I realized he had been right all along, from the very beginning when we fled from Tong Xuyen.