“To live with dignity, the important thing is never to despair. You give up once, and everything gives way. They say ginger root becomes stringy, but pungent with age. Unhappiness forges a woman, makes her selfless, compassionate.”
My mother had lived like this, according to proverbs and duties. She wanted me to show the same selflessness. And what had I done? My uncle, her younger brother—her only brother—had asked for my help. He was sick, and here I was, preparing to abandon him.
When she smiled, I always noticed the sparkling whiteness of her teeth, aligned in perfect rows, and it made me sad. This was the last trace of her beauty, her youth, of a whole life lived for nothing, for no one.
“Ton’s family has always lived in peace with everyone,” my mother stammered. “They’ve never laid a finger on anyone here. You know that. Here in the village, everyone knows who’s bad and who’s good.”
Uncle Chinh interrupted, correcting her sternly: “You must not let yourself be influenced by others, or betray your class. We must crush the landowning classes, these cruel oppressors, and return the land to the peasants. If you don’t listen to me, you’ll be forced out of the community and punished according to revolutionary sanctions.”
She too must have known this weariness, this despair. Like us, she must have had to reinvent hope and a yearning for life. The song crackled forth like the wing of a bird lost in the limitless blue of space, like a spark from an inferno.
I listened in silence. The evening’s repugnant scene flashed through my mind. The music had come from that bastard’s room. So this was life, this strange muddle, this flower plucked from a swamp.
“How about some more of those green-tea toffees? I’ll buy some for you tomorrow.”
“Mr. Tao flavors his flour candies with ginger. Can’t you taste it?”
Mother would bend over me, murmuring these things. She looked at me tenderly, with a sort of admiration in her gaze. It frightened me. The other women in our neighborhood never looked at their children this way.
“Mother, when you were little, was there always someone like this?”
“Mmh. She’s dead now. This one is her daughter.”
I was mesmerized by her huge, splayed feet. They were scored with tiny cracks, encrusted with gray patches of dead skin. Decades before her, another woman, just like her, had crisscrossed the same village, plodded along with the same feet.
[…] I didn’t dare ask her if, in another ten years, I would live her life, this life. The thought made me shiver.
This voraciousness put me ill at ease. I knew she was my blood, the link to my father. This was the love that had been buried, impossible to imagine.
I stood very still, letting her touch me, caress me. Her wizened face, which ordinarily must have been quite severe, was ecstatic, reverent. “She’s a drop of his blood. My niece,” she murmured.
Someday I’ll be even richer. This ancestral house will be renovated. It’s going to be even more opulent than before. I’ll show people. Even if I have to tear this body of mine apart. […]
People say I’m extravagant. I tell them, “Yes, that’s right, and I’m offering this to myself in memory of all my suffering.”
She stepped back to inspect me. The jewelry was unbefitting a nine-year-old girl, but Aunt Tam had the gaze of a painter before a portrait. These jewels had been locked in their hiding place since the day of their purchase. I should have been delighted; instead, I was paralyzed with fear. I touched my earlobe, tracing the sharp edges of the lozenge-shaped stone. I pulled my hand back and stuffed it in my pocket. I felt chilled, numb. I didn’t know why, but there was something sinister about all this finery, like throwing flower petals on an abandoned grave.
My mother was stunned and embarrassed. “l can’t accept all this. I’ve got enough to celebrate Tet already. This is too much. How could we eat it all?”
Aunt Tam replied coldly, “I’m not giving this food to you. This is my offering to my brother’s memory. It’s all for Hang. She can offer the food to her teachers, her friends, anyone she likes.”
“He’s all the family I have left. He’s so unhappy. Needs so much.” She went on, indignant. “And your poor cousins…they looked so straggly, like potato vines.”
I thought to myself, Mother, why don’t you just say what you mean: “My two nephews, my two little drops of Do blood.” At bottom, she was just like Aunt Tam. These were the only two loving women I had in my life. I said nothing.
I knew she had been counting on Aunt Tam to offer me the Tet banquet. That suited her just fine, since it left her free to put her savings toward her brother’s family.
“It’s just splendid, our Tet. Thank your lucky star.” She kissed me. I couldn’t stand the indignity of it, and I turned away.
How could my mother accept this humiliation? Why did she lower herself in front of my uncle and his pockmarked wife, before their children? Why did she love people who enslaved her?
Years later, whenever I traveled in the Vietnamese countryside again, I always stopped to contemplate these flowers: in real ponds, in real villages. Ponds just like we had near Hanoi: stagnant, oily bogs flecked with bubbles from rotting algae; murky pools surrounded by a clutter of miserable hovels, ramshackle gardens, and outhouses stinking in the summer sun […]
At the center of these stifling landscapes, on a green carpet of weed, those purple flowers always glistened, radiant in the middle of the filth: the atrocious ornament of a life snuffed out.
Cadres in my country lived for these moments, for their luxury goods. They were good at this sordid secondhand trade in scarce imports. Some even lived off it. My uncle was no exception. All he cared about was the contents of my suitcase.
One night, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I said to my mother, “I don’t even have the energy to study. Let’s sell one of the rings.”
“We can’t. They’re Aunt Tam’s,” my mother said, irritated.
I tried to keep calm. “She gave them to me. I need to survive and study before I can wear any ring.”
“No,” she snapped.
“Mother, I’m hungry,” I pleaded, biting back my tears. She went white and glowered at me. Suddenly, she jumped up, screaming like a madwoman, “No! Shut up! I said NO.”
“So there you have it, Mr. Uncle Chinh. The old child molester had never set foot on a dance floor. Of course, he did like to lecture his workers about how dancing was decadent, how their generation indulged in shameful pleasures, and how everyone should devote himself to the revolution. He had the same worldview as you, the same tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to insult you. I know you don’t have the same vices. But I must say, the resemblance is somewhat troubling.”
“The Saratov is mine. I paid for that refrigerator with my study-grant money while I was in the Soviet Union. In this house, only the television is yours. Sell it if you like. But try and explain that to the boys.”
I drifted off in silence; the couple, lost in their calculations, probably didn't even notice my departure.
What did these people have that we didn’t have? Hundreds of faces rose in my memory: those of my friends, people of my generation, faces gnawed with worry, shattered faces, twisted, ravaged, sooty, frantic faces.
Our faces were always taut, lean with fear. The fear that we might not be able to pay for food, or not send it in time, the fear of learning that an aging father or mother had passed away while waiting for our miserable subsidies; the fear that some embassy official just might not.
I had never met a man so gentle and yet so firm. He had helped me. This was the first time in my life I had accepted help from someone outside my family. With him, my problems seemed to melt into thin air.
It had taken time to grow up, to leave this place, finally to understand this song, the refrains that had haunted our miserable little streets for as long as I could remember. This same voice, this same unchanging sadness. A life snuffed out, aborted, without a whisper of a dream. It was a life unlived, a vegetable existence suckled on rubbish heaps and water lilies, fed on the brackish surface of a bog. You survived life here, but you never really lived it.
It had been an evening like this when I “returned” to my village for the first time, when I had a mother I could still run to, who would hide me in her arms. I had been happy, confident. I had yet to meet Aunt Tam. […] This was my corner of the earth, my own paradise etched into the final evening of my childhood. The lapping of waves, a sunset glowing violet over the horizon, a bleached-out mayfly shell floating on the surface of the water. And I had my mother then, the magical, unique paradise of childhood.
“When…” she whispered. “When I am dead… stay here… keep this house… the altar to our ancestors. Remember to think of replacing the orange trees… and…”
[…]
This was her legacy to me, I thought. Its price was a life deprived of youth and love, a victory born of the renunciation of existence.
Forgive me, my aunt: I’m going to sell this house and leave all this behind. We can honor the wishes of the dead with a few flowers on a grave somewhere. I can’t squander my life tending these faded flowers, these shadows, the legacy of past crimes.
[...] I sat down, cupping my chin in my hands, and dreamed of different worlds, of the cool shade of a university auditorium, of a distant port where a plane could land and take off…
