The Eaves of Heaven (7 page)

THE NORTH
JUNE
1944

11. H
OI AND
I

H
oi whispered, “Look! A
muong
grasshopper to your left.”

It was a big one, light green, the exact shade of young rice leaves, with black sesame seed eyes. Clinging to the underside of the leaf, it had its wings folded back, hind legs cranked high, poised to spring.

I hushed him and tiptoed around the plant.
Muong
grasshoppers were very skittish. You had to come at them from their blind side. I cupped my palms and clapped my hands over the grasshopper.

It jumped.

Hoi wailed, “Oh, you let it escape!”

“I didn’t let it escape! It’s just too fast.” I was as disappointed as he was.
Muong
were the prettiest and the tastiest of all grasshoppers. They were also the hardest to catch.

It fluttered a short way on white wings and settled back into the field. Hoi slunk past me, eyes fixed at the point where the grasshopper had vanished into the green. He took slow, careful steps, one hand steadying the bamboo basket slung at his waist.

I was hot and tired, and I wanted to quit. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky or a shade tree in sight. We had prowled the fields the whole blistering afternoon and all we found was grasshoppers. Hoi carried his crab basket, even though neither of us had seen a single crab in weeks. We had our lines with us, but the Walkers’ camps crowded the riverbanks at every fishing hole. Folks said Walkers ate babies and small kids, and blamed them for missing vegetables, poultry, and pets. Although we were too old to believe that, we knew Walkers were very thorough scavengers and would eat just about anything they could get their hands on. We wouldn’t find anything on the land they had covered.

They started arriving after the last harvest, when the Japanese forces imposed a massive rice requisition to feed their armies. At first the men came, alone or in small groups, mostly sharecroppers and tradesmen. They all walked, too poor for any other means of travel. You could tell they were either related or at least from the same village by the way they stayed close to each other, shared food, and let the eldest ones speak for the rest. They carried bedding, cooking pots, and the tools of their trade. Clearly, they were not beggars. Even though they worked for food, there wasn’t enough rice in the village to feed them all, and eventually they moved on to the larger towns.

The next wave brought women, and now there were children as well. Our village was overrun with strangers. The stronger ones still made their way toward Hanoi, but those too famished to continue camped down by our creek. They begged at the market and came to my family’s estate for the free soup Uncle Thuan offered twice daily.

At first, I didn’t understand the turmoil around me. I disliked these strangers invading our village. When I refused to help serve in the soup line, my mother said it was the responsibility of the rich to care for the poor. Heaven would not look kindly on us if we turned our backs on these people. She said that with the Japanese army’s relentless rice requisitions, most villagers did not even have enough food for their own families. We should not be afraid of these transients; they were only farmers who lost their rice stocks as well as their seeds. They took to the road because there was no hope in waiting for the next season when they had nothing to sow into the land.

Hoi halted and stood completely still, his eyes roving about. He didn’t move for a long while. I almost told him to give up when he raised a hand to warn me. Hoi crouched down and snaked his right arm slowly between the rice plants. His hand shot out and grabbed the top bud of one plant.

“Did you catch it?”

“Of course.” He giggled with a squinty-eyed grin. He had the fastest hands of any boy I knew. Hoi was half a head shorter than me. I was better than he was at studying, flying kites, and running, but he was better at things important to nine-year-old boys: fishing, hunting crickets, making flutes, and throwing rocks. Hoi showed me the grasshopper. It was as big as a thumb.

“Hey, kids!” A woman shouted from the dike separating the fields.

She wore faded black clothes, pants rolled high up her pale, bony legs. The afternoon sun clawed through her tattered peasant hat of palm leaves, making tiger-stripes on her face. She was as weathered and thin as the scarecrow in our garden. I thought she was a Walker.

She shook a long pair of bamboo tongs at us. “Don’t step on the rice plants!”

We stood in the middle of the field. Like many paddies that season, it was so sparsely seeded that we hadn’t stepped on a single plant.

Hoi waved. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Cau. Did you find a lot of feces today?”

“Not a lot, not a lot at all. Not enough food to eat, not enough feces to find,” she replied in a sing-song tone. “Not enough feces to find, not enough fertilizer for the crop. Not enough fertilizer for the crop: Not enough food to eat!”

“Don’t worry, we won’t step on rice plants.”

“You’d better not. It’s bad enough with the Japanese devils stealing rice right out of our mouths, we don’t need kids trampling the crop as well…,” she said, her words trailing off. Abruptly, she turned and walked away with the basket on her hip, her tongs moving side to side, skimming the top of the grass, searching.

“Poor Mrs. Cau,” said Hoi. “She’s a widow with no children. She has to collect shit every day to make a living.”

“That’s enough to make a living?” I asked.

Hoi shrugged. “Lots of village people go out to the fields to shit. We are not like rich people with outhouses.”

“So? At least you don’t have to put up with the smell of the latrine! Don’t complain.”

“I’m not, I just said she got enough.”

“She trades it with someone for rice?”

“No, she mixes it with ashes from burnt straw and grass and sells it as fertilizer. She goes out twice every day: once very early in the morning when the dogs haven’t already run out, otherwise they would eat most of the shits, and once in the afternoon after lunch.”

“Where does she live?”

“Her place is at the end of the village. My mom makes me go there to buy fertilizer.”

“I want to go there with you next time.” I had a rich kid’s curiosity about poverty.

“Why? Her shed smelled so bad, I thought I’d fallen into a giant pile of shit whenever I went there!”

We laughed, but I still wanted to go. Besides, there wasn’t much else to do. We used to play games, but ever since the last harvest, all Hoi wanted to do was fish or hunt for edible critters. It had been weeks since we were in school. Teacher Uc had not been paid in months and only half of the students made it to class. The older kids had already dropped out to help their families in the fields. Most of our friends had fathers or brothers who had been conscripted as coolies for the Japanese army. Those who came to school couldn’t hear the teacher over their own growling stomachs. It wasn’t long before Teacher Uc, who happened to be my father’s second cousin, decided to disband the classes.

Hoi asked me, “When do you think we’ll have classes again?”

I shrugged. I knew his parents were very proud that Hoi was the first in the family to attend school. Hoi was the family’s only son, and his parents treated him like a prince, the family’s treasure and salvation. Regardless of a man’s prestige and fortune, not having a son to carry on the family line was the biggest failure of a man’s life, an unforgivable sin against his ancestors.

“I’ll ask my mother to let you come and study with us,” I said and clapped him on the shoulder. Teacher Uc tutored us twice a week at home. Every Friday afternoon, he stopped by for tea and cakes with my mother.

Hoi glanced up and smiled as if he knew something that I didn’t and wasn’t about to tell. He turned and headed off toward his house. Hoi was the poorest student in the class. His family didn’t have a single rice plot. I knew he wasn’t comfortable being inside the estate. Whenever my cousins were around, Hoi got very quiet and refused to eat anything I gave him, always saying he wasn’t hungry.

Hoi’s family lived at the edge of the village, in a two-room bamboo cottage. The yard had been turned into a vegetable garden full of beans, yams, maniocs, and eggplants. When we got there, Mr. Bui was on his knees, working on the hibiscus shrubs that fenced around the family’s property.

I bowed. Hoi grinned and shook his basket.

“Did you boys catch any field crabs today?”

“No, Father, but we’ve got plenty of grasshoppers.” Hoi’s family was fond of crab soup. It was very good with
banh da.

“What are you doing, Mr. Bui?”

“I’m mending this hole. We lost a lot of vegetables from our garden last night.”

“Walkers,” Hoi mumbled and led me inside. His family didn’t have a big guard dog; they couldn’t afford to feed another mouth. Small dogs were worthless because they were often lured outside, killed, and eaten by the Walkers.

The house was smoky and cramped. The whole family slept in the back room and used the front room for making
banh da.
Mrs. Bui and Hoi’s sister, Lan, were hovering over the cooking fire built in the middle of the floor. Even though I was from the wealthiest clan in the village, Hoi’s family was always nice to me, especially his mother.

“Mrs. Bui, I brought you some guavas from our garden.” I had access to our whole family orchard so it wasn’t hard to bring them something whenever I visited. We had all sorts of fruit trees, so something was always in season.

Mrs. Bui thanked me. Lan looked up, grinning. I knew she liked green guavas with chili-salt. Small and even more frail than her mother, Lan rarely talked, the size and manner of her smiles saying most of what she wanted. She was fourteen and pretty in a wan, wispy way. She spent most of her days with her mother in the kitchen.

They squatted in front of four steaming cauldrons of boiling water, each kettle with a cloth stretched taut over it like a drum skin. They poured a ladle of rice batter onto the cloth, swirled it into a thin round layer, and placed a tin lid over the cauldron to let it steam, working fast to conserve firewood. In a few moments, they removed the thin
banh da
with a bamboo stick and laid it out on a rack to dry. It was simple but exhausting work.

“Mrs. Bui, you’re making a lot of
banh da
today,” I said, pointing to the racks filled with wax paper packages. “You must have many orders.”

Mrs. Bui opened her mouth to speak, but stopped herself. She took a deep breath, then smiled. “Would you like some
banh da?
”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Bui. We’re going to roast some grasshoppers,” I said.

If food weren’t so scarce for them, I would have accepted. Since Hoi and I became friends,
banh da
had become one of my favorite snacks. There were many ways to eat them. You could toast them and eat them plain like crackers or with dips. You could serve them with meat or salad, or add them to soup, or deep-fry them like chips. You could also soak and cut them into strips to make noodles. But none of these dishes were the sort of food people ate during the famine. It seemed odd that they were grinding up rice to make
banh da
while people were stretching their rice stocks by making thin soup. This was almost wasteful, because rice satisfied the stomach far better than
banh da.

I would learn much later that foot soldiers often soaked
banh da
in water, rolled them up with a bit of brown sugar, and ate them on marches, during ambushes or fire-fights when they could not light a cooking fire.

W
E
sat under the eaves and killed the grasshoppers by pinching their heads. Hoi buried them in the embers of the cooking fire. I was salivating by the time he brought them back on a hard square of dried palm leaf. The toasted grasshoppers were very hot. Their burned wings had turned into thin layers of ash clinging against their bodies. I snatched the biggest grasshopper, plucked off its head, and stripped away its legs. Rubbing the steamy little nugget between my palms, I blew away the ashen wings and burnt bits. When it was cool enough, I popped it in my mouth. It was flaky and crunchy like a butter pastry with a nutty-meaty cream center, and faintly salty like tofu skin.

I didn’t know why, but the first one always tasted the best.

But they were all so good, we gobbled them up as quickly as we could. I didn’t care that Hoi had less to eat at home than me. We raced through the whole batch, not bothering to count out our shares.

I smacked my lips, looking at the final pile of grasshopper heads. “We were lucky to catch so many. I thought the Walkers got most of them already.”

“They can barely move. To catch a grasshopper, you have to be fast.”

I took out two peanut candies from my pocket and gave him one. Hoi had expected it all along. I always brought some sweets and they would be the last things we ate.

Hoi bit a small piece from his candy and sucked on it to make it last longer. “You are my best friend.”

“You are my best friend too,” I said.

He grinned broadly. “Hey, look at all those dragonflies on the hedge. You want to catch some and catch frogs with them?”