A drizzle weaved itself into a curtain of fog, and the Trống Island seemed to sway as the boat docked to pick up Gift.** Gift scanned the horizon but couldn’t see a single thread of rising smoke. The island was serene. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Perhaps the mist rising from the water kept the smoke of the stove from drifting above the trees’ canopy and the moss-covered boulders. On the way there, the boat tossed and jolted as it plowed through the waves, dizzying Gift’s empty stomach and making her feel nauseous. She hadn’t had time for dinner. Oversleeping, Gift dashed to the pier where the boat was waiting. A group of men laughed lecherously at her unevenly buttoned blouse, one lapel down, one lapel up.
Gift looked at the lustful men, unable to remember if she had put the blouse on herself or if someone else had done it. The men brought her to tiny Trống Island by boat. They said if Gift traveled along a range of menacing rocks, she would find Sáng’s home, which was the most imposing one on the island. Gift couldn’t miss it. The men then maneuvered their boat back into the ocean, not forgetting to tell Gift that Chín Ái passed along his greeting.
But the man on the island didn’t remember who Chín Ái was, or what gratitude had made him send such a bizarre gift. He usually received things like beef, warm clothes, a radio, and so forth, but nothing that promised sweat and moans. Every month, dozens of boats swung by to ask about storms. Even when the weather forecast didn’t warn of any imminent tempests, the ocean was only peaceful if Sáng said it was. People trusted him the way they believed that underneath placid waves unfathomable perils were concealed. Sáng said he could predict the weather via simple “intuition.” More than once he frantically warned boats from unfurling their sails: “It’s not a joke! A fierce wind!” It was one of the people who survived a storm because of Sáng’s warning who had sent him the sultry gift.
Gift shook her pants to dry them and looked across the small island, lamenting how dreary it was. Why didn’t humans come here? The house she arrived at was even weirder. Wind permeated every corner of it, leaving it without a cozy nook. Was there something edible in the kitchen? Even burnt rice would be fine. Since early that morning, Gift had had only one bowl of noodles at the Đông estuary. She waved her hands in front of her host’s eyes and confirmed what she had been told. Blind. It was incredible that a blind man could live in this place.
Gift said that she had been paid to come stay on the Trống Island and play the role of a wife for a day. They said her husband would be a blind man named Sáng, which means “light.” Gift smirked and calculated her price, not offering a discount on account of his disability. All men were men, after all. Gift didn’t care about her journey to an island twelve miles from shore, to partner with a lonely man living on water and beneath the sky. It was like being marooned, Gift thought when she first gazed upon Sáng’s “mansion” nestled amid rocky ridges of vegetation and wildflowers. The rocks were just specs of dust on the surface of the ocean. When Gift got off the boat, she sensed that she had forgotten something—her bulletproof clothing. But she didn’t care because her blind husband looked gentle. Curling herself up in a torn blanket, Gift thought she would sleep a bit. Who said that a wife shouldn’t sleep? As she thought about it, she could already feel herself slumbering. Lying straight on her back would help Gift forget her life—the sound of someone knocking over a frying pan or ripe mangos falling to the ground in the front yard.
Gift got up when the chickens had returned to their perch on the back roof of the house, after wandering around all day in search of food. Sáng was groping around and stumbling.
“Stay still, honey, don’t panic. Your wife won’t eat you.” Gift flirted while looking for food.
He sat down and leaned his back against the door like some neglected beggar. He knew the darkness that sheltered him would eventually be penetrated.
While rare, it was not the first time he received a woman. There was once a lady who came to stay for only a week before leaving, because she couldn’t endure the suffocating solitude. “I would wait for you if you came to the mainland,” she said as she left. Sáng could only smile. The ocean breeze soon whisked in salty air to replace her scent. It was like waking up after a six-day dream to the sound of splashing waves. The eternity of the ocean was a magic balm that healed all wounds.
A brisk wind roared in and Gift groaned at the pain of the cold air striking her body. How could she bathe in such temperatures! Pulling Sáng closer to her body on the wooden board, Gift unwrapped herself as the wind slid up her skin, making all her delicate body hair stand on end. Gift nudged her husband to make love to her and warm her up. After clumsily groping Gift’s skin for a while, Sáng sensed a flame burning in every cell of his body. Even so, he left her skin cold whenever their bodies melted into each other. “Because of the wind,” Gift said.
When Sáng’s hand touched the scar on her wrist, she said, “Oh, this was when I tried to kill myself.”
The scar resembled a worm lying across her wrist right above the veins, and Gift had numerous different stories for its origin. She said her name was Đào and her old house was located next to a small temple where a grove of cedars rustled beneath rain all year round. Đào’s mother was a vocalist for a group of traditional singers in the Gò Tây neighborhood. They performed at funerals, and thus often got drunk. One time at midnight, the straw heap in the middle of the neighborhood caught on fire. The blaze rose to the sky and gave off a repugnant burning smell. The villagers soon learned that Đào’s mother was still sleeping inside. Half a month later, her father remarried. On his wedding day Đào had joined some other children in the neighborhood to catch mice. As she put her hand in a burrow, a mouse dashed out and one of the boys quickly sliced it, injuring Đào’s hand at the same time. Blood streamed down her wrist, mixing with the mouse’s blood.
After unlocking from one another, Gift’s hair lingered on Sáng’s neck and she flirted, “Call me Phượng, dear. I didn’t have a father until I turned twelve. One day, my mom brought home a man with prominent facial bones and hollow cheeks; his eyes were mostly white. My mom introduced him, saying, ‘Phượng, this is your father.’”
Gift explained that her stepfather usually helped Phượng bathe when her mother was collecting money in the neighborhood. Half a year later, her mother found out about his inappropriate behavior and they had a terrible fight. The father was enraged and attacked Phượng’s mother with a cleaver. Phượng stretched out her arms to protect her mother and was slashed. The father was so frightened that he ran away. Phượng’s mother didn’t call the bastard back. His name became a curse word.
“Hey, I just made up those girls to entertain you. This island is so desolate; it needs a human voice. At Đông estuary, they called me Mỹ Châu. My grandmother loved cải lương*** so she baptized us with the names of the artists. My grandmother was the owner of a rice mill, the wealthiest in Bàu Dừa. There, only us Châu sisters could afford to wear dresses that billowed like butterflies. When I was sixteen I heard that a buyer would stop by the mill to get rice. I had been sitting by the pier reading a novel when someone called out, ‘Hey, dear.’ Looking around, I only saw a blackbird turning its head, listening, and hopping around in its cage. ‘Hey, dear, follow me, an impoverished life is joyful.’”
“I stealthily slid down into the boat, rolled up my blouse, and unveiled my body. As the boat drifted away, I burst into laughter along with the silver-haired boat owner. Bidding farewell to dresses, I became the thirteenth wife of the grocery-trading boat owner. That is, until the fourteenth wife showed up. I left and took the blackbird with me. The bird sang to me, Don’t cry. What the hell are you crying for? then it flew away, leaving me desperate. That’s why I cut my wrist.”
“Are you still listening?” Gift asked before turning over on her side. Her heavy thigh was stretched over Sáng’s lower belly. Her cracked heel rubbed against his thigh. Her body reeked, probably because she hadn’t taken a bath since her arrival. Those who came to Sáng never knew that he used his imagination to trace their bodies in the dark. Using their voices, the sound of their smiles, the way they breathed, he sketched their portraits, knowing that they were only smoke when exposed to light. Raising his fingers to the lips of the woman to ascertain her colors, Sáng wondered how old she was, and what her name was, Châu, Phượng, or Đào. Gift was exuberant, not living just one life that lasted only three sentences, like him.
Light stopped dancing across his eyes when he was seven and got chicken pox. At the age of ten, his mother had pulled him close and said, “If only I had birthed an egg, I would’ve put it in my bag and carried it with me.”
He had an unknown disease and became blind. Three years later, he woke up and could sense in the darkness that there was no one around him. He was the only one left after the boat, in which he and twelve other people were fleeing the country, went missing. In his first days on the Trống Island, he hoped that in those waves that kept rushing onto the shores, there remained his beloveds.
As the morning neared, after warming each other up, Gift turned Sáng onto his back and asked, “Why did you run all the way here?”
He wanted to offer up some gripping story, but couldn’t, so he joked, “I peeped on someone’s wife while she was taking a shower.”
Gift laughed uproariously. Her left breast was pressed against Sáng’s body, sagging and cold. Sáng heard that question time and again. Nobody believed that he lived on the island because he preferred it. Whenever he had offered, “Because I like it,” other questions always followed. Anyone else who drifted to the island was always caught up in some crime or debt. Or they were misanthropes. They said that on the Sếu Bạc Island, there was a gang of wanted thieves. Everyone knew where they lived, but nobody bothered to go after them. Surrounded by water and sky, listening to the sound of rushing waves every day, humans become docile. After observing how they dug for water, planted vegetables, and raised chickens to eat, the officers acquitted them. If bumping into one another on the ocean, they treated the past as insignificant.
While fabricating her life story, Gift kept asking Sáng about nothing. The part about drifting across the estuary and becoming someone’s mistress was true, but the rest was only fabrication she added to give her life some glamour.
When she woke up on the island the next morning, she washed her face, which recalled the pubescent beauty that used to harvest rice stalks at Ngã Hai. One time, a sickle cut deep into her wrist. At the time it made her angry to think about how such a beauty had to labor under the roasting sun all day, her blood mixing with sweat. So she became a prostitute. It may have been a shadier profession, but it was also more lucrative.
“Since yesterday, I haven’t received any wounds and I’ve enjoyed free meals,” Gift said with gratitude.
This woman was so blunt, worlds apart from one Út Hên who had turned twenty-six the previous afternoon. The girl from Rơm Market followed her boyfriend to a film studio, where they were making the movie Billowing Grass at an ancient temple. Someone asked her if she would like to act in the movie. The role was simple: a character riding a motorbike that turns her head to tell the main actress, “The enemies are after us.” After shooting, the film crew left abruptly, as did Út Hên. For three years she worked with the film crew, never playing any role but someone riding a motorbike. She never even had any more lines. Film producers, after looking at her breasts and thighs, concluded that she couldn’t land any other roles. But just the other day, she was assigned the part of a prostitute who cut her own wrist. Út Hên thought she would play the role with all her heart. She made a real cut, bleeding so much that it poured through the band-aid and the antiseptic cotton ball. Thinking about the role made her dizzy.
“More dramatic than the lives of those who came before me, right?” asked Gift, her mouth smelling like ripe mangos. Mangos were dropping onto the muddy ground all around them and Gift tore into one while asking for more to take home. “If I get pregnant this time, I’ll quit my job, go back to my hometown and deliver our baby and name him Mango.”
Suddenly, Sáng trembled, enraged. He had expected Gift to use the mangos to scrub her cracked heels. He tried to withhold his anger. He wasn’t the one who had invited her here, so he didn’t mind seeing her off at the dock as the men on the boat cheered her arrival. During the twenty-seven hours she was with him, Gift never once even approached the kitchen. Who said being a wife meant cooking rice? Gift only idled around, offering up different stories of dramatic young women.
The boat’s engine eased into the crashing waves. The ocean would be rough for the next few days. Sáng could feel the colossal waves cover his body. She said she might have a baby. Was that true or something she said just for fun? If it was true, what could he do? He didn’t even know her name.
** “Gift” is an intentional translation of the main character’s Vietnamese name, Quà, which holds the meaning of “gift” in English. Furthermore, it serves as a metaphor highlighting the commodification of women as “gifts” within the context of men’s business affairs.
*** A form of modern folk opera, particularly popular in the southern region.