Eight

Adoption Day was supposed to be the best day of your life, the day you left behind the watery soups, pee-smelling bedding, and mildewed walls of the Kind and Caring Home in Hanoi, hand-in-hand with your new yellow-haired parents, these Americans who lost the war but nonetheless returned like conquering heroes.

For Le Cong Trang and his sister, Mai, it was the worst.

In Thang Ba, Month Three, of 2005, Trang was not quite eleven years old, and Mai was twelve. They’d spent two years at the Kind and Caring Home, plucked from the spoked streets of the Old City by people who supposedly mirrored the home’s name but who in reality rubbed hands together in glee at the exorbitant fees commanded from barren foreigners. Among the street rats the home’s operatives were well known and ranked only a half-step below the police and Fat Fingers—Hanoi’s number-one pimp, specialty, pre-pubescence—among those to be avoided. Worse yet, the home was rumored to be in league with Fat Fingers, assessing upon arrival whether a plump and comely boy, or that rarest of all commodities on the streets, a near-teenage virgin, was worth more to them as an American couple’s shiniest prized possession or as Fat Fingers’ sale of the month.

Mai had been ten, then, nearly of an age to be traded to Fat Fingers when she was dragged squalling away from a display of dolls where she’d lingered too long, eyes avid, oblivious to the approach of Old Quang, the home’s “sweeper” who doubled as a scout for Fat Fingers. But in those days Mai was a shrunken, hunched thing, with a swollen eye that leaked pus and blisters about her mouth from eating food snatched hot from streetside braziers. Trang, who crept from his stairwell hiding place when he saw his sister captured, was considered the more obvious prospect, with his sleepy round eyes and plush mouth. An assessing gaze—and Old Quang had honed lecherous discernment to a lethal edge—could see the beautiful youth he’d become. But he was so little, and everything had its boundaries, even the depravities sought by sunburnt tourists with overstuffed billfolds.

Who could have predicted the way Mai’s body would straighten and fill out on the laughable portions that passed as meals in the home? Or that her arrival would coincide with a rare visit from a physician, who prescribed the antibiotics that cleared up her eye, although for the rest of her life she would employ the sidelong gaze she’d developed during the worst of the infection. By the time a new crop of Americans swept through the home on one of its regularly sponsored “volunteer opportunities” for the guilt-ridden, she and Trang were desperate. Neither needed a mirror to tell them that their time was short. Already Old Quang had run his calloused hand across Trang’s soft cheeks, had tugged Mai’s damnably wavy hair free of its demure bun and leered at the way it fell over her shoulders. Mai wondered aloud how much he would get for selling them. The Americans were their last hope.

But this batch was like all the others, gravitating toward the youngest, scooping the rare babies (“stolen from their mothers’ arms!” Trang wanted to shout) from their cribs, or wrapping their arms around startled toddlers. “That one.” Mai elbowed Trang, pointing to a three-year-old decked out for the day in a western-style dress complete with ruffled pinafore. “Her mother sold her to Old Quang last week. Her husband left her and she has five others at home.”

She and Trang hung back along the perimeter of the concrete courtyard, which had been hastily decorated for the occasion with tall vases holding branches of pearly sura flowers and delicate peach blossoms. Miss Hoang, the home’s director—“the human abacus,” Mai called her—passed with mincing steps dictated by a too-tight ao dai of shimmering rose silk that clung to the rolls circling her torso. “She gets fat from the money she makes off of us,” Mai grumbled as Miss Hoang stopped near the couple fawning over the three-year-old.

“At least she looks out for us,” Trang said. It was true. Whenever Miss Hoang saw Fat Fingers slinking around, she chased him away with shouts and curses, once with a broom. She did everything possible to make sure those in her charge went home with new parents. Yes, she profited, but to the best of her ability, she kept her charges safe.

“Oh, you musn’t take her from us. She is so dear,” Miss Hoang cried now, hiding a relieved smile as the woman’s arms tightened around the little girl.

“We should have been caught when we were younger,” Mai said. “We’d have had a chance. No one wants older children. Only the babies.”

“And nobody wants bui doi.” Trang slung the phrase with abandon, anxious to rob it of the power that had relegated first their mother and then the two of them to the streets. Bui doi, dust of life, the derogatory term applied to children of Vietnamese women and American soldiers.

Which they weren’t, technically, Mai reminded him of that now, as she always did. They were a generation removed, their mother the one to rightfully receive the insult. Trang remembered her barely, the cascading curls, her skin the color of ca phe sua da, the black-black coffee lightened and thickened with condensed milk and sipped in comfort by the fashionable who populated the Old City’s fan-cooled outdoor cafes.

Their grandmother had never told them what happened to their mother, but she didn’t need to. There were others like her, plenty, thinking they’d be safer in the north where the people hadn’t mixed with the Americans, but one look was all it took and people knew. A child like that could never hope to have a normal life, to marry well or even poorly, and for the girls there was only one line of work, one that led inevitably from prostitution to drugs, and no one ever recovered from that. The grandmother who’d raised them, whose unwise pregnancy had resulted in the doomed daughter and now the doomed grandchildren, had died not long after their mother had disappeared. Hence the streets, the home.

Mai pinched his arm, bringing him back to the present. “They can’t tell we’re bui doi.” She nodded toward another couple who’d entered the courtyard. No pale magazine Americans these two, the man huge and dark, the woman so slight as to nearly disappear beside him. “Smile.” The flat of Mai’s hand struck Trang’s back. He lurched forward. “Go to them. Hurry, before Sad Linh makes her move.”

Sad Linh was a girl of seven whose special talent involved attaching herself to the leg of the nearest American and wailing as though her heart had shattered as her victim tried to pull away. “You see how she loves you! You must not leave without her,” Miss Hoang would say, so far to no avail.

Mai and Trang had unsuccessfully endured several of the “volunteer opportunities” that were little more than cattle calls to match aspiring parents with suitable children, and had formed opinions of Americans as a result. They were fat, they sweated and smelled bad, they shouted when they spoke, and they smiled and smiled and smiled. These two flashed their teeth when Trang sidled up to them, but their cold eyes lacked a corresponding gleam.

The man, though. An ease about him, an approachability despite his intimidating size. A light flared in his eyes, an indrawn breath of empathy as Trang drew near. Trang made the sort of split-second judgment that had ensured his survival on the streets for so many years: whom to trust, when to run. This one. He’ll understand. The man, as if divining his thoughts, nodded. Trang would need to woo the woman. He turned to her, made his voice soft, his features worshipful. “Kind lady,” he breathed. “Beautiful.” He inclined his head toward the man. “Lucky huh-band.” His tongue struggled with the unfamiliar S-sound of English.

And that was all it took.

“Oh, honey.” The woman crouched before him, held out her arms.

“What’s your name, buddy?” The man stuck out his hand. Trang shook it with two hard pumps, the way he’d learned. The woman still clutched his left hand. She looked a plea toward her husband. “Bryce, look. He’s probably just Kwesi’s age. He’d have a friend from the very start.” Her eyes shifted. She dropped Trang’s hand and touched her husband’s arm.

“Honey?”

Trang followed her gaze to Mai.