TUYEN’S FATHER’S HOBBY was drawing all the buildings in the city as if he had built them. In his spare time, which was brief, after the restaurant was shut for the night, after the produce was put away, and the kitchen cleaned, and the lights dimmed, Tuan would go home and draw. Because after all that work he couldn’t sleep. He had gone past tired to that wide-awake state that prevented him from sleeping until three or four in the morning. Tuan would often begin working on his drawings at one of the tables in the restaurant, not bothering to go home when the rest of the family left. He could not always endure his wife’s insomnia, which was not a restful one like his, but a continuous pacing, throughout which she went over again and again the scene at the bay when they both lost sight of Quy.
Cam played the vision over in her head, trying to regain the moment when she did not see, trying to alter the sequence of events so that she would arrive at herself in the present with her family and her mind intact. Just a split second would have been all the difference. Why hadn’t she noticed that moment as she should have? Why couldn’t she reclaim the time? Why had this happened to them? It was she to blame, it was she who could have with one turning of the head caught sight of Quy and pulled him to her. She could taste that moment, she longed to live it, it terrified her. She had such a deep sense of shame she felt inhuman.
Tuan, for his part, worked to stave off his own lessening. No work was back-breaking enough for him. He welcomed the rebuff of Canadian officials and employers to his licensing as a civil engineer as it matched his sense of unworthiness and dishonour. There was nothing they could take away from him, nothing he had that he had not lost already. Though despite both himself and the powers that be he was successful. But he drew buildings as if he was still what he was.
He did not like to think of that moment the way Cam did—if he did, he would have days of paralysis when he could not get out of his pyjamas, his limbs felt weak, and he could not work. He would glimpse himself at the bay, feeling relief that they were finally leaving, ticking off in his mind all the preparations he had made, all the months of secret negotiations on getting his savings out and then the dangers of talking to the wrong people about their departure. Had he hesitated a moment too long or a second too short in all these phases of the planning, and had that hesitation pushed events off-centre? He was only too aware of how important it was to have the right weight of objects, the correct angle of alignment for a stable structure. So too with events. To be able to stop when seeing danger, is knowledge. It was all dangerous, but he had not been able somehow to measure the danger, to apprehend the most crucial moment like the weakest point in a structure. Guard the home you have, and regret vanishes. This is what in his outward demeanour he strove for. Keep the order of the household—when people in the home are strict, it is auspicious to be conscientious and diligent. The household was strictly committed to these mantras. But, still, neither of them, Cam nor Tuan, could find a cure for their alertness.
She paced, he drew.
Tuyen learned to draw from her father. She had imitated his posture and the movement of his drawing hand since she was a child unaware of what he was actually doing. Amused by her mimicry, Tuan gave her pieces of paper and a ruler and they both sat creating drawings of boxes, bridges, pipelines, buildings. Tuyen’s drawings quivered on the fantastic, first because she was a child and her lines would become wavy, or as her mind wandered she would include a face here and a kite there, but as she grew older these inclusions became more deliberate. Her father’s annoyance only spurred her to perfect the fabulous as a practice. A head growing out of a drainpipe, a river flowing through the roof of a house. Gradually Tuan became used to it, convinced by then that she would not, as he had hoped, become an engineer like himself. Architectural school, perhaps, then. There she could express that creativity. Even with this, though, she had dropped out, and Tuan was at a loss to figure out how to control her. He had in his estimation lost control of his family since the night in the bay. All his efforts were to hold together the constantly slipping limbs.
It was inevitable that Tuyen would apprehend the seepages in her family’s life. There was always in the house the double life, the triple images. Not to mention the outside world, which was threatening and which was the engine behind the manufacture of still more fantasies. Tuyen’s love of the unexplainable was inevitable. Her parents became for her subjects for observation and intuition. In art school, which she went to next, she discovered Remedios Varo. Remedios Varo’s father was a hydraulics engineer. He trained Remedios to draw by having her copy his diagrams and drawings. From imitating him, she learned depth and detail. Added to which, they say, she had a rich dream life that leaked into her own drawings and paintings. Tuyen discovered this coincidence with her own life at art school, and her brief stay there, if it was good for anything, awakened her at least to this.
When Tuyen had found her father at home in the middle of the day in his pyjamas, she knew that meant he had spent the night awake drawing, and that meant a paralysis had overtaken him. Her mother, too, must have been awake pacing, as she had done over the last many years. Pacing or writing an endless stream of letters to authorities in every Southeast Asian country, searching for Quy. Terrified of returning to that part of the world herself, Cam had become involved with a network of officials, charlatans, magicians, crooks, and other distraught parents like herself in her search. Tuyen had once happened on a collection of these letters, whose duplicates her mother kept for easy referral and follow-up, and hope.
Dearest Mr. Bowles, UNCHR,
Please excuse my bad English but my state of distress is great. I believe that you can help find my Quy and know where he is. I have no sleep since he disappear from me and my husband. Enclose is a photo of him. If in your list of lost boys, please to find him, and his mother and father is awaiting at Refugee Settlement House, Toronto.
Please do your best.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
Dearest Mr. Chao, Hong Kong,
I am sending the money here which will pay for your investigation. I’m happy that you are close to finding our boy and eager for his return. Whatever is necessary we will do. We left Chi Ma Wan Camp on September 29, 1980, at 1 P.M.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
Dearest Mr. Thieu,
I was sent your name as a person who could help us find our son Quy. He will be ten years old now. Enclosed is a laminated picture of him. He will not be much changed. Here is a laminated picture of my family so you can know what he would look like. Also money is in close to.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
April 25, 1986
Dearest Sir, Mr. Chao,
I’m happy that you think you have found Vu Quy. The money is coming for his passage to us. You brought me so much joy.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
October 19, 1991
Dear Editor, Thai Daily,
Please post this ad in your newspaper: Reward of Canadian dollars for information as to the whereabouts of Vu Quy, last seen at bay on March 28, 1980. If you were at that place and have any information about this person, please write to Vu Cam, 5713 Meadow Way, Richmond Hill …
January 15, 1991
Dear Ms. Ebhard, UNCHR,
Please also to forgive my English. Your Mr. Bowles has sent me to you. Our boy is lost now few years. We hear of a list of lost people and we ask for it. If in any of your travels you have seen him. Here is a laminated photograph of my family to help you searching.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
Dear Editor, Bernama, Malaysia,
I’m looking for a small boy by the name of Vu Quy. He knows his name and his parents’ name. If you find this boy, please hold him. There is a reward of money for his return.
Sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
May 5, 1997
Dear Editor, Lienhe Zaobao, Singapore,
Why do you not print my letter any more? Have you no heart? Have you no mother or children? …
June 29, 1999
Dear Mr. Chiu, astrologer,
I am sending you $350 today as agreed. The day is indeed auspicious as you promised. I slept somewhat last night for the first time since arriving in this country and I know that must mean that my son is safe.
Respectfully and sincerely, Vu Duong Cam
Yet Tuyen found her father slightly elated on the drive to the city. He seemed to have forgiven her for her reference to the family secret.
“Where you off to, Tuyen?”
“Home, Bo.”
“Oh, home is not where your family is? Home is that nasty place?” She sensed slightly less conviction in him. As if he were joking with her a little.
“Oh, Bo, don’t start again.”
“Okay, okay. You know, soon maybe we will have some news …” He broke off as if he’d said too much. She prompted him.
“What good news, Bo? Did you buy another restaurant?”
“Oh, never mind. New restaurant? No, well. You see.”
It was the most confidential the father had ever been with her except when he indulged her in drawing with him. But on serious matters he was a virtual tomb. The rest of the ride to Toronto was mostly silent. Tuyen felt slightly uncomfortable. She wanted to apologize for insulting him, but her usual forthrightness deserted her. She changed the subject to Binh.
“How’s Binh? Where was he today?” Did her father know about Binh’s plans? she wondered. Was that the news he was referring to?
“Binh? Good boy. You should come home if you want to see him.” All conversation led to this point with her father. “And why don’t you help him when he asks you? You have a duty …”
“Oh, Bo, you know I don’t like selling. It would be very bad if I helped him. No one would buy anything.”
Her father laughed. “It’s true. What? What are you good at?”
“Bo, I’m sorry for hurting your feelings.”
“Don’t be sorry. You come home and everything will be fine.”
He either deliberately misunderstood her or hadn’t taken what she’d said in the same way as she thought. She kept quiet for the rest of the ride; he took it as an acknowledgment of his rightness and seemed prepared to leave it at that this time. He did not launch once again into his usual harangue about friends and family, about duty and obligation and honour.
When the car neared the Saigon Pearl, Tuyen asked her father to drop her off. She was always afraid of Tuan dropping by the apartment, even though she often told him to come see for himself that she was fine. He didn’t put up the usual fight this time, just said, “Binh is a good boy, you respect him. You call.” Tuyen hugged him and hopped out of the car. “You come home,” he called after her.
She felt there was something odd about her father’s behaviour. Not his behaviour, more like his demeanour. She sensed a lightness about him. Something she’d never sensed before. She wouldn’t say that her father was a gloomy man, but he cherished correctness, propriety, and in this he appeared dour. Now she perceived a slight change in him that was startling to her. He was usually so purposefully serious that the hint of any lightness, and it was only the merest hint, seemed extravagant. She would have to call Binh after all. Perhaps agree to help him out at the store again. That twinge of embarrassment she had felt when Carla said the word “mine” about her own brother returned.
Though Tuyen and Binh were not far apart in age—he was eighteen months older—they were in sensibility. They’d never been particularly close. Mostly they had fought each other for their parents’ attention. Binh considered Tuyen a usurper in his quest for their affections—he was the only boy and the favourite, it seemed, until Tuyen came along. Then no amount of cherishing was sufficient for him. Tuyen seemed to get attention simply by being the newcomer. It would be easy to say that this sibling animosity followed them to adulthood, but it didn’t: their roles were simply different. Binh was the cherished boy, Tuyen the baby.
Yet they could not get along even though they were collaborators of a kind as regards translating the city’s culture to their parents and even to their older sisters, they were both responsible for transmitting the essence of life in Toronto to the household. It was a job Binh took tremendously seriously and Tuyen took, as far as he was concerned, with too much whimsy. Binh would translate instructions from teachers or a mailman or the hydro man. He would invariably slant these to his own interests, as when a bill arrived, he added arrears to the amount, pocketing the extra, or when notices from the parent-teacher meetings were sent home, he would suggest that teachers wanted to discuss the fact of his father making him work too much in the restaurant. Tuyen, on the other hand, always threw those notices away, and when the hydro had to be cut off for fixing a main, she would tell the household there was an emergency in the city and that she would not be allowed to go to school for the day. With the exception of when they were quite small, they never fought outright since an all-out war would not be beneficial.
The uneasy collaboration made them wary of each other and therefore mistrustful. So when her father said Binh was a good son with that minutely discernible sense of elation, Tuyen was immediately suspicious—this lightness she ferreted out of her father had something to do with Binh and that dangerous idea he had hinted at a few weeks ago. Her brother was once again trying to focus the drama of the family on himself, and that could not be wholly good. For him perhaps, but not for everyone else.
Binh was a mercenary trained in the trenches of childhood to get his way. And in the particular war waged in the Vu household, his way was sucking up all the attention. He perceived, like all his siblings, the vacuum left in his parents by that night long ago in the bay on the Vietnamese coast, and in his efforts to fill that unnamed space he went to great lengths. Not knowing precisely what was necessary, he tried every angle. Recently he had assumed more and more of the responsibility for the restaurant. Lately it was packed at night with his friends occupying several of the tables toward the back all evening long. His interest in the restaurant had been spasmodic—usually around some bright idea for a karaoke machine, or small jukebox machines on the tables. Tuan would shoo him away, telling him he had no head for business and asking him how those ideas would make money.
Binh had been sent to the University of Toronto to do business and had left with all the credentials of an M.B.A., namely a distaste for the straightforward and honest, a mistrust of social welfare, and a religious fervour for what was called the bottom line. His education had enhanced his penchant for ungenerousness and solidified his resolve that only he mattered, though he had also been indulged at home beyond the bounds of favourite son. Since he was, in effect, two sons, the one lost and the one found.
But it was a difficult task to stand in for a mythic tragic brother who, not having to do anything, never failed at anything. And who, not having a physical presence, could never be scrutinized for flaws and mistakes. That mythic brother grew in perfection, it seemed, as Binh felt himself struggle for adequacy.
Binh was that strange mix of utter overconfidence and insecurity, utter ruthlessness and squeamishness. So while he invested fifteen thousand dollars in a shipload of migrants from Fushen to British Columbia, he did not want to know the details or, of course, be named if they were discovered. Though if they were not discovered, and even if they were, he stood to make a profit of three or four hundred per cent on his investment. His was not the lion’s share in this enterprise. He was a small investor. But he stood to make even more if some of those migrants found their way to Toronto, from which he and several colleagues would arrange their transportation to New York City with proper documents. He also had a small investment in a home-based Ecstasy manufacturing plant, which distributed to high schools and raves. Binh, like all businessmen who run multinational operations, could swiftly pull his money out of one concern or another and invest elsewhere. For safety, and because he did love electronic gadgets if he loved anything, he ran a small electronics store in Korea Town on Bloor Street.
The day Tuyen moved out of the house, Binh stood outside the kitchen door waiting for her. She was heading down to the garage to borrow her mother’s car.
“I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said, grinning at her.
“Well, I did.” She was surprised by the almost complimentary sound in his voice.
“Hey, I can drive you if you want.”
She felt a softening toward him and a relief. At least he understood her need to live on her own.
“Thanks, I can drive myself.”
“Ma said I should drive you, no big deal.”
She didn’t feel like struggling any more, she’d withstood the crying and the badgering and at least Binh hadn’t tried to dissuade her, so she let him take her, and her garbage bags full of clothing, to her new place above the store.
On the drive downtown they said nothing to each other, and Tuyen was grateful for that. It occurred to her that the silence between them was more than silence. It was a leave-taking. It would be solely up to him now to carry out whatever other duties of translation remained.
“This is a dump,” he said when they arrived.
“No, it’s not. It’s great. Look at the ceilings.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t go saying it’s a dump, okay, Binh? I don’t want them going more crazy about it.”
“You should stay home, save some money, and get a condo. That’s what I’d do.”
“I’m not you.”
“Guess not. So, later. I’ll take the car back to Ma.”
He handed her the last garbage bag and picked his way down the staircase, squeezing past an old stove on the first landing. Tuyen felt the faintest stirring of fear watching him go. Then she realized with a kind of joy that she was about to be alone, and with unusual friendliness, she called after him, “Bye, Binh!”
Today he still lived at home devotedly. In fact he, unlike Tuyen, had no feelings of restriction at home or urges to find himself. He was himself under the adoring eyes of his father and mother and the watchful knot of his two older sisters. He came and went as he liked, he bought a BMW, and if he had girlfriends, he stayed at their place when he needed privacy. His spiritual motivation, if he was aware of a spiritual side, was to so please his father and mother as to seal that opening in their hearts left by his mythic brother. Yet over the course of his life so far he had not been able to come to that project without a deep-seated resentment. That their love was not given wholly and unadulteratedly, he felt, made him return it in kind. Then too, his lost brother had been a child, and as a man now he felt shame about his resentment for a child. How could he match such perpetual innocence? How could he compete?
Neither he nor Tuyen, nor Ai nor Lam, could say that their parents had ever fully declared them second-rate to their lost child. Cam and Tuan were parents in the way they knew—dutiful, authoritarian, good providers. And certainly Ai and Lam, who were the only other witnesses to that loss, did not think in those terms ever. They were born in the old country and understood their positions before Quy’s loss, understood as a matter of culture; and surely if they had harboured any hopes of changing that, of living out their fantasies of the North American teenaged rebellion, with Rolling Stones concerts and independence and free sex, Quy’s loss squelched those hopes.
It was Binh and Tuyen who were in a position to feel second-ratedness as a visceral marker. Their culture was North American despite their parents’ admittedly ambivalent efforts to enforce Vietnamese rules, and in North American culture they knew it was de rigueur to love children equally and for children to claim that kind of love as a right. Binh picked up on that lost right and made all efforts to collect it. Tuyen, on the other hand, was made merely curious by its absence. She preferred to explore other aspects of North American birthright, such as independence, free love, and artistic irrelevance.
Tuyen had never felt the need to keep an eye on Binh’s dealings, but as she left her father and walked along College Street toward her apartment, she felt a deeper stirring of uneasy interest. About her family she had taken a superior view. She considered them somewhat childlike since her power over them in the form of language had given her the privilege of viewing them in this way. And her distance from them, as the distance of all translators from their subjects, allowed her to see that so much of the raison d’être of their lives was taken up negotiating their way around the small objects of foreignness placed in their way. Either they could not see the larger space of commonality or it was denied them.
But superiority aside, she was still broke. Watching her mother, she’d had second thoughts about breaking into her sleep to have her mother force money on her. She had become so preoccupied with having hurt her father and wanting to apologize to him, and her sister had put her off with the threat, despite her cool response. She had, as usual, become confused and tangled up in their presences. Some day she wants to mount an installation of the characteristics of her family, if only she could imagine the science with which to do it. It would be a hundred boxes of varying sizes made of a transparent translucent material floating in a room, suspended by no known element. The floor of the room would be water, and she would walk through the room bumping into the boxes, which would not be discernible to the naked eye. As she collided with the boxes, things would fall out, spikes and keys and mouths and voices.
She would have to go to the restaurant later and borrow some money from her father; though she hated giving him another opportunity to scold her and lecture her about dropping out of school, about living downtown, she was desperate and would have to endure it. Or she might take Binh up on the offer of money for keeping the store, which would also give her a chance to scope him out; to see what he was up to. She had told him she wanted nothing to do with his idea of digging things up, but she had no illusions that that would stop him. Admittedly, she had abdicated to him her role as arbiter between the outside world and the family, but she might have to intervene if his scheme—she was sure there was a larger scheme behind it all—placed them in jeopardy.
But her father was shrewd, she assured herself as she neared the apartment. She and Binh might have been the translators, but her father ran things. He determined from which version to abstract the family’s course. Still, her parents had a vulnerability that she had known for as long as she could remember, and it made her feel protective of them; it had sometimes motivated her interpretations of the exchanges between officialdom and her family more than self interest.
Stopped at the light, she laughed at this partially disingenuous assessment of herself. She remembered her child self, her teenaged self, impatient with her mother’s repeated attempts to get accreditation, tired of making phone calls for her, writing letters of explanation and not mailing them as she was instructed, knowing that her mother’s letters were so convoluted that they likely would only prove her unqualified for consideration. Bureaucrats, Tuyen knew, were not impressed by long letters containing life stories. There were forms that had to be filled out with no addendums, no laminations. Anyway, she had been a petulant child, thinking her parents incompetent and wishing they were different, similar to some perfect parent she had in mind who was not Vietnamese and for whom she did not have to translate the world.
“Hey, what’re you laughing at?” Carla had come up to her on the street, caught her laughing to herself.
“Oh, Carla!” Tuyen snapped around. “I was so worried about you last night—and this morning. Where’d you go?”
“Walking. What’s funny? People will think you’re mad or something.”
“You didn’t talk to me this morning, what do you care?”
“I’m sorry …” was all Carla offered.
Seeing her about to dive back into the morning’s mood, Tuyen said, “I forgive you. See how easy I am?” She brushed a hand over Carla’s left cheek. “Jackie was over this morning and Oku. They came for coffee. They might check by later.”
Tuyen chatted the rest of the way to the apartment, trying to keep the mood light. She was happy simply to be in Carla’s company again. She didn’t mind caring for people who were not her family—it was so much easier; they actually did not expect it and were more than grateful for it. With other people you could begin from the beginning, together you could create your own forces, your own stories. Love was easier, it was unexpected, pure. Because it was unasked for, unsolicited, yes, unexpected. Like Carla. She loved Carla.
With her friends, Tuyen could be lavish. They took it as a gift. They took each other as gifts. They were marvellous each time they met, bringing each other messages from the realms of their families and poring over these messages like found jewels, turning them over in the hand and listening to the sounds of them as they clinked on each other. Now that they were older, the details of their families lives loosened on their tongues, becoming fantastic when they lay together on the ratty couch at Tuyen’s, examining them. This was Tuyen’s interpretation, at any rate.
Now, walking toward home with Carla, the uncomfortable feeling she’d had observing her father seemed already to belong to another world. The fear she felt—no, she would not call it fear—the presentiment she had now appeared as just another secret box for examination.