Years pass. Lin thinks she is maybe twenty-two now, or older. No one alive knows Lin’s age, but her hands are still the hands of a girl, her face bright and delicate.
She pushes her black hair behind one ear. Where she sits it is quiet, a park where old people sit in daylight. From only a street away, she hears activity and noise, buying and selling, motorbikes and hawkers. A world is going on, lives being lived. She watches bats cross the body of the distant moon, and thinks she is as far away from her own blood as the moon is from earth. The bench where she sits is rock, old enough to be green in color, as in the cemetery. It was not destroyed by the war. There is a sweet smell. The road that is near her, behind the ginko trees planted by the Chinese, is the one that brought her from far away. It is larger now and traveled by automobiles, bikes, and without a sign of the people who once marched, ran, or died there. It is as if she’d traveled light-years and arrived now at a place where time and space intertwine. And in the dank scent of evening, the rich odors of old earth, they do. Her memory lives with the present as if it is all one, her village, the old ones, and this place, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon.
But for now her father, too, is light-years away, and as she thinks of him she remembers more than she has told anyone. She was always one for memory. She remembers her life near the rice paddies and water. She remembers that he did not want to leave her. She knows that. She cannot blame him or be angry and so her feelings belong only to her. She remembers the day the dark machine came down from the sky. They’d been there before, but this time the men in uniforms showed up in the early morning at the funeral of Lin’s mother, amid the smell of incense, the burning joss sticks. Strangely she does not remember everything about her mother’s death, just the smells and the helicopter.
Always before when the machines arrived, they heard them cutting through the sky. There was time for her father to hide beneath the ground in one of the damp caved-in tunnels. She was afraid of the tunnels. She still smells them, sees the tree roots, the green molds and mosses growing. Underground, secret entrances known only by a few. Most of these had not held up because they were too close to water and the clay was poor. But some of the tunnels were numbered, mapped, and then later forgotten. The Americans never knew how much underworld the tunnels covered. They were known and forgotten by the North Vietnamese who had lived there, even cooked there. Later, the Communist Party with their insistence on a different kind of order did not even recall them.
Sometimes, too, before ambushers and thieves passed through, her father hid in one of the places where their food had been stored.
But that particular morning, her mother was dead. Her father had too much grief to think of hiding, maybe to even notice when they dropped down from out of the sky. The Americans were there to make him leave. To take him “home.” When they tried to take him, he protested and fought them off, walking away from them. The village was his home. She still sees one of them reach toward him, her father’s arms rising up out of the man’s grip, his tight back as he walked away and back toward her, his child.
Lin doesn’t know her mother was killed by a land mine while chasing Lin. There is no one left to tell her.
She doesn’t know, either, that her father remembers the same day over and over. That he remembers how the old man in the village, the one who always smelled of lime and flowers from his meditations, postponed their departure. Maybe he thought Thomas would disappear if he distracted the captors. The old man put them off as long as possible, the blue cloth in his hand. The Americans were made to wait. Their impatience was obvious, a shaking leg, darting eyes, the way they exchanged glances. Thomas explained to them that this was how it was done on a day when everyone was grieving.
Lin remembers this now and thinks she is alive, but her mother, the maker of shoes, the onetime cashier, is not, and Lin forgets her at times. No one ever told her about the death of her mother. Whenever she asked why her mother would go into a minefield, they only said it was a mystery. “No,” said Auntie. “Her favorite chicken went there and she was chasing after it.”
The village people found ways to make the army wait. One man read a story. To do so was a gift, the soldiers were told. He did it slowly, translating to English. It was the story of the butterflies that had lived in the forests. The soldier-searchers were impatient. “It is a funeral,” Thomas told the intruders again. His voice implied again how rude they were. “You must wait.” He himself listened and cried. Now there were no more butterflies. No forests. Then another story was told. It was the story of a wise man and a wise woman who had survived the French. The wise woman always wore a red scarf around her neck. They called her Red. But then the wise man and woman were taken into captivity by their allies and never seen again and after they were gone, the village people, without the guidance of these two, forgot to treat the world well. They neglected to be kind to the birds, or greet the trees. They thought that was why they were bombed by a fire god from the sky. Otherwise the bombs would have turned into birds and flown away like leaves in a wind. Soon there were no leaves, no birds except one, and it dropped a red scarf over the village where the two had lived, reminding those who remained.
Maybe, Lin thought at the time, this was why Grandmother, the eldest woman, always wore a scarf around her own neck. Later she learned it was to hide her scar.
Then some of the accounts of Thomas were recalled. At first that included how well he fished for them. Lin didn’t listen well enough. She was still thinking of the story and the birds. In her eyes she could see them as they once were.
And one man praised Lin’s mother. Crying, he said, “Oh, how well she made shoes. No one ever made shoes like Ma did.” Ma. Her mother’s name. She, the girl, is named for her mother’s real name. Thuy Doc Lin had made shoes waterproof by using the sap of plants no longer there, long since bombed. Lin had a special pair. They were a bit too large for her so she could grow into them, and she wore them anyway. Each one had an artificial red flower on it.
But stories were their riches.
They even told the story of the horse that had come from France and made it by boat to their village. They first worshiped its beauty. Then the old man said, “I rode it everywhere I went. I even rode it to Old Grandmother’s house.” Even though it was a funeral, the people laughed because Old Grandmother’s house had been only a short distance away. Some remembered the horse and how the man rode it in every possible position, not by choice. In spite of themselves and the sad day, they laughed. He rode it sideways, leaning over the neck with his round face in the mane, thrown across the top, and he rode it almost underneath, yelling as he went.
“What a scene that was!” said a tiny woman.
But it was a double sadness that day, a funeral and the taking away of Thomas. The people were afraid they would take the girl, too, and then afraid they wouldn’t because they realized the direction the war had taken when the Americans left and maybe she’d live like a queen in America and maybe she’d be killed in their world. So when she cried, “Papa,” to him, they told the Americans it meant “Uncle” in their dialect.
Oh, and they gave Thomas gifts to take back, a Mickey Mouse watch—who knows where it came from?—a carved box, a square piece of hand-dyed cloth, a bell, and even a prized American baseball hat he didn’t want to accept because it meant so much to the owner. One by one, he was given something small from each person there as the chicken still boiled in the pot, the one chicken that would feed the multitudes. Ma’s chicken that was not killed by a land mine.
They set out the feast for the men, who looked at the food, the chicken looking a little gray to them. Fortunately it was only a tiny amount. The vegetables were sliced well but unfamiliarly. The rice was wrapped in what looked like leaves.
One said, “We just need to take him back. We don’t have time to kill. There’s no time to eat.” But they were talked into it anyway and they ate little, mostly the rice which was less likely to be contaminated because the water had boiled.
As they went to leave, her father turned and looked back and as he did, they handcuffed him. “They act like he’s a god or something,” said one of the Americans.
Then they left and Thomas watched until all grew small on the ground. He wept. How could he not? Down there was what he loved. His other world seemed dimensions away.
He cried the whole time even as he was taken up into the wind. Lin remembers that, and the grasses moving in circles so hard, her hair blowing, the wind on her, a woman pulling her away. “Papa!” she yelled, crying. The noise was terrible.
“It’s okay. He’ll be back.” Lin barely heard the words, but she believed them. All her life she’d been told she was the child of a savior, a beloved man, a man of great beauty and spirit, and that someday he would come back with the spirit they so loved. She believed them and waited with hope. She was certain each morning when she woke and washed her face in the bowl: This day. This.
For such a long time the small child, Lin, watched the sky for him to return. Her father the fisherman fed many villagers. One day he had come to Lin with a red koi from the river market and it was in a white bowl. She loved the fish. She stood beside roads. Waiting. Holding the fish in its bowl. Watching for him to come down the road. In her blue skirt, she stood outside in the rain and waited. It seemed everyone cried except for Lin who believed he would return and so she waited, smiling, watching. For nearly a year she watched.
Thomas, her beloved father, the man who had brought a red fish from the river to her, was taken away. This, the handcuffs, and the fish are her memories.
Right now she hates memory. She sees it often now, in the city, old men crying with their memories, and their memories so terrible, and they have to contain it all within themselves. Nevertheless, they sit together as friends and sometimes gamble, sometimes playing cards the Americans left behind, talking about small things, someone always saying, “You cheat!”
For her, memory always hurts. She has no memory of her mother. Sitting on the bench she tells herself there have been light-years since then, the days in the country by the river, but even so it is all here now like the light of a star traveling the night, and the bats catching insects in the light of the full moon.
Then, back then, they heard a new army was on its way and they had to leave the village. The old man, knowing he would die, sewed three things into Lin’s jacket: the address of an uncle in Saigon, what is now Ho Chi Minh City, hoping the uncle was still there, and the address and photograph of her father now in the United States, along with a folded map. “This map. Be sure you keep it. It is important. It tells where we are.”
When Old Grandmother set out, she took her chicken, a pot of flowers, and a teapot. It was more than she could carry and someone had stolen their cart. Lin carried the teapot and the fish her father had given her. Someone else took the flowers from the old woman. “Keep quiet,” they were warned. At first they went down past the houses on stilts in darkness, thinking the water would be safer to travel, but then they saw the water was dangerous, too. Sampans burned and there was the sound of men shouting. “Hurry!” someone said, and they stepped into a boat and they tried to float away, but not far from there they came to a bend in the river. There even more boats were burning and things were floating where they shouldn’t be, clothing on the water, shoes. It was so light from the fires, it was like daylight. Men and boys swarmed the little boats and rafts like ants that take over the other ants. She recalled hearing an infant cry, then suddenly stop. Its silence chilled her.
“Does it hurt when you die?” she asked her grandmother on the boat.
Her grandmother smiled and said, “No, and someday we’ll all see each other again,” because she knew already she would have to be left behind.
And then Lin was forced to leave. Old Grandmother said, “I will go back home. You go on. Go!” And Lin followed her orders, looking back at the small woman. It was just before her grandmother would be turned to light. The ant boys were swarming. They were like the ants she’d seen leave their hills to cover over an entire animal someone shot, or come through a village in droves and enter everywhere while the villagers tried to flee.
There was such confusion. A young man she didn’t know came and said to call him Uncle and she was made to go by land. Already there was a trail, a train of people, animals, their special things, their worn clothes and wagons and cages and bottles, but they were walking again toward another loss. Lin had only her goldfish now. The goldfish her father had brought from the river market. She carried it in a tall glass now, one she’d found.
On the way, Lin lost the young uncle who had warned them about what was coming toward them. She lost him in a bomb attack by the new boy soldiers. She looked back. Everyone scattered. There were bombs with nails, with pieces of metal, with fins. All around the girl, people screamed and bled in a flurry of movement and sounds. There was confusion and running. She was certain her heart had been hit because it hurt so bad and she cried.
The path had been changed from mud to dust and it rose up in clouds as they ran. It would become mud again from the blood. A young man picked Lin up to help her. He grabbed her under his arm, but in the commotion and running about he fell and she ran with terror after trying to pull him up and she couldn’t and finally she saw it didn’t matter and left him on the ground, another of her sins. Sins she couldn’t have helped, like leaving Old Grandmother. Another young boy came. She looked him in the face and waited for him to die, too, but he wore a uniform. He looked at her with wide-open eyes for a long time, then let her go.
She has told this to no one except now, later, to her husband, older than she is by six years, and he becomes very silent.
Then she was alone. They did run. One of the new enemies, as she then knew them, grabbed her, but she fell and escaped and ran without knowing where.
Out of good fortune she believed given her by the shoes of her mother, she was thrown into a truck by someone. She, a child with no emotion on her face by then, no more tears, just unblinking eyes.
She stayed in the truck, curled up behind the others, and then began to cry as she realized her feet hurt. She wore the shoes but her feet hurt. Someone stopped the truck along the way and she smelled fear. Words were exchanged, but she didn’t understand them from underneath all the human flesh. Someone was made to leave the truck. And somehow she was saved and traveled on, hearing gunshots, she, the girl with little legs and hands, the girl who wore her favorite red flowers sewn onto the tops of her shoes.
Later, even after the bottoms were worn out, she kept the shoes. They would touch the heart of a woman. Now, an adult, she still has them, in a cloth bag.
She was a child alone in the city, one of many such children. They walked in the city and back streets at first like ghosts. She had an uncle, but no one knew where he was. She unstitched her dirty jacket so carefully, leaving her father’s picture and address and map still inside, removing her uncle’s address, showing it to people, asking.
Most tried to avoid her as she seemed to wander aimlessly. A girl with a village face was bad luck. She was one of the Ugly People. She would be sent home or rounded up and reeducated or she would simply die on the street one night. Others who looked at the paper said they had never heard of such a street. Some said, “I don’t read.” Even the cyclo drivers who knew all the parts of town had never heard of this number or name.
Lin had a few coins, but at first she started her lost life in the city begging for food. “Please,” she would ask a shopkeeper, looking at the soup or noodles or at the fried fish or a pastry wrapped in paper. Sometimes one took pity on her, but usually they sent her away, themselves too poor to give anything away, and too many beggars. Finally, she squatted down and thought hard and made a plan. She decided to stay on one street. Even hungry. She would make herself useful there. They would get to know her. She would make them want to keep her, to feed her, to give her small jobs. She used a broom that had been kept outside a shop which no longer existed and she swept the street made of old gray stones, the walkway, and picked up all the trash. After a while, she was noticed and recognized. Then, finding rags, old clothing, she began to clean the shopkeepers’ windows. When the afternoon rains ceased, she wiped them dry, to a shine. “Hey,” the woman at the florist shop called out. “Get out of here. Stay away from my window!” But this street was clean in a town half bombed and filthy. This one street where some of the communists had moved into the buildings upstairs and sometimes, when no one looked, one of them even tipped her. He looked like the young “uncle,” the one who had been there so suddenly and then been killed. Later, she knew he must have fought for the wrong side then. There were too many sides.
Every morning, she woke from the tree where she lived, sometimes damp from rain. She combed her hair with a comb she had found that once belonged to an American. Then she went down on her short legs, already an ambitious girl, and swept the streets in front of all the half-surviving businesses. She was a small girl then, and young, with small dimpled hands. Those who saw her on the street and felt sorry for her didn’t show it. They had their lives. And theirs were also sorrowful. She was a child among children and everywhere they walked were children. Sometimes they had an extra coin for her. Sometimes they didn’t. There was no predicting when or what, if anything, decided it. They were all survivors there. No one thought about where she slept at night or what she ate. The town had been broken and everyone was just trying to put their lives together again and even a child understood this.
Light-years away. This is what she tells herself.
She still showed everyone her uncle’s address. No one knew of it. One kind man even searched a map of the city. Perhaps the street name had been changed. “To fit the regime, you know,” he explained. “It’s all changed.”
And there was kindness. Daily the flower keeper’s husband said, “Did you eat yet today?” He slipped her a piece of fruit, and down the street a grocer always gave her a hard-boiled egg. And the woman florist herself sometimes, in spite of herself, slipped her ginger candy, the woman with the square, angular jawbone, arranging the purple orchids, the flowers and green leaves, hurrying from the refrigerator to the ribbon, looking up as if she couldn’t be too careful of the “new regime,” even though the orders now were to renew their businesses. Most things that even hinted of the West had been destroyed and forbidden. Even haircuts and clothing, until it all changed again. But bread was still there. Lin longed for rice, but she settled for anything. The old man at the tea shop on the corner still kept different kinds of breads—the Americans had liked breads—and he gave Lin some of the sweet or still-fresh leftovers. She did well, she thought, with some of the businesses now encouraged by the new regime.
One day the husband of the florist gave her rice wrapped in a leaf. “Where do you sleep?” he asked. He wore a striped short-sleeved shirt. Behind him were flowers. The room smelled of hibiscus and plumeria. She sniffed the air, her eyes closed. She smelled the rice, then ate it, at first too quickly. In her memory was home, the aroma, the glint of sun on rice fields. And her mother.
But she told no one where she slept. She didn’t want to be taken away or found in the branches of her giant tree. Even those collecting the leaves for their own memories did not see her in her nest of branches. It was her tree, singing, creaking insects and all. She climbed quickly, like a monkey could climb. Still in the worn shoes made by her mother, she prided herself on that.
She only pointed in the direction of the park. And at night she walked to the other side of the street, the long way around, so he wouldn’t know.
But he knew. He took this up with his wife.
“No,” she said, a pencil always above her ear, her hair piled high. “No one is going to live in here. We hardly have room as it is. There are kids all over the streets. We would get caught. Who knows, we could be fined or worse. Here. Forget it and get on your bike and deliver these flowers. Here’s the place.” She handed him a map and note.
He held the directions, but continued to talk about the girl. “But on this street, who would tell? We all know her. She cleans it up so pretty and even that cruel boy above the grocery, he gives her a coin some days. I see him.”
The woman set her jaw tight and waved him away.
Sometimes, too, a coin was slipped to her by the florist’s husband who also stole from the money box for himself. Lin kept silent about this. They had a secret pact. He didn’t tell that he helped her, she didn’t tell that he went to the square and gambled with cards and dice. Sometimes he let her wash her hair so she wouldn’t get lice like the others who lived out there on streets or alleyways. The woman herself was usually too busy to notice and perhaps, truly, she wouldn’t have cared anyway, but the husband and Lin felt like conspirators and they enjoyed it. Nevertheless, the woman became suspicious when the man lost too much. The woman, thinking the missing money was because of Lin, said, “You give the girl money. Or maybe she takes it. I think she could be a thief.”
“No. I don’t. I give her nothing. She doesn’t take it, either. It was the boy,” he lied. “He came in today. I had to pay him again not to break the windows.”
“Ai, him again.”
But Lin thought the woman knew more than she said.
And yet Lin had the soft palms of a child and a sweetness about her and the woman softened now and then, and gave her a meal with sweet rice and sometimes mango.
Because of the kindness and persistent pleading of the shopkeeper’s husband, Lin was given a job at the flower shop cleaning. She cleaned the dark green doorway. She cleaned up the leaves and petals that fell on the yellow floor.
“Sometimes I think of her as a niece,” the man said.
His wife did not smile at this. She thought of her own daughter, the one now killed.
Then one afternoon as it rained and while they were closed for their afternoon naps, Lin fell asleep on the floor of the shop in the back room and she had a dream and began screaming and she cried like a child.
The woman went to her. “It’s all right. Shh.” Then she saw her shoes, her feet showing through the bottom, cracked and scarred and looking sore. She began to think, for the first time, of the girl’s history, and for the first time, that Lin was just a child, a very young child, not a threat or a problem. She considered where she might have come from, what she might have seen. One part of her thought, well, hadn’t they all? But then, instead of thinking that the girl, like everyone else, was just another taker, a small contriving adult, the woman picked her up and held her against her heart, feeling a movement of her own grief, how small Lin was, a girl like her daughter had once been. Now only a picture on her altar. The man watched, his own eyes with tears, thinking of the child they had lost when the communists stormed Saigon and everyone tried to escape.
“She sleeps in the park,” he said. “I think she came from the Delta. I think she escaped the Khmer. Maybe she’s from Cambodia and not where I think. I can’t be sure, but I think I see them in her eyes at times. I see the face of Buddha.”
“Don’t say that word.”
Soon the flower woman decided to keep Lin in a corner of their space, “Over here. Over here.” She sounded impatient. “You sleep there.” She arranged a mat on the floor, a covering, losing her pencil in it.
One night Lin found a new pair of shoes beside the mat on the floor. They were only plastic and they were white, but they fit and she was happy. She tucked her other shoes in beneath her little pile of things and then one day the woman left her a pair of pants.
Yet Mrs. could change without notice. Again one day, she said, “I think the girl is taking money.”
“No, no.” Finally, her husband sat down and confessed. “It isn’t her. I am the one. I take the money some days.”
“What? You? You are just lying to protect her.”
“No. I admit it, I go play cards. It’s only a little money.”
“You monkey! You idiot! You waster!” She picked up the broom as if to chase him away, but then put it back down. “Maybe you need to work harder. Now Lin will deliver flowers. You clean.”
As a child, Lin grew too fast and her bones ached. The florist, wearing her hairnet, soothed her knobby knees with a Chinese liniment in a green bottle. When that didn’t work, she used a Korean oil. It was a bottle that came in a tin because the cap leaked in every single bottle. On the front of it was a girl that looked like Lin, with black bangs. Still Lin hurt. And the woman decided it was chemicals from the war, or the poison smoke, because Lin was from the country. Again her compassion bloomed like her plants. Until she misplaced a ring or bracelet, and then she would think once again that Lin was a thief.
Eventually Mr. arranged a heavy cloth curtain and also a doorway with a deluge of green plastic beads hanging down to separate Lin from them.
Lin was paid a weekly amount. She delivered flowers and she cooked. At night she studied English.
As Lin grew older the flower woman, her back bent a little more, gave her a little more space separated by a piece of cloth the color of lilies and fine enough that a breeze carried the scent of flowers to her mat. The curtain moved and, as they napped in the afternoon, she watched the cloth in the air change colors like a cloud, and watched its soft movement. She thought, as she daydreamed, as she dozed, of her father. She lay on her side and sometimes took out his picture, quietly, so as not to be heard.
She went to secret classes at night. She had a hunger for knowledge. Because there were no schools, they met nights at the teahouse on the corner. Dr. Bread-baker, she called the man who had been a soldier once, taught English, reading, and writing, even algebra with the missing equation. Someday she would go to her father. They could not know who her father was. It would change their view of her to know that she was half American. She felt guilty about this. When she saw the other children of American fathers who had no place to stay, no food, she gave them coins and hard-boiled eggs.
She was bamboo, growing so fast, so lovely, so fluent you could read all of it on her narrow face, all her feelings and languages. There were old songs inside her, and the sound wind makes as it passes through the bamboo forest.
She remembered, later, on the afternoons she rested, some of them. She remembered the line of people on the road, having to leave with their babies and goods. She remembered leaving her grandmother crying in the boat, Grandmother with a pot of flowers and the chicken, something alive that she hadn’t lost and thought she needed and Lin with her fish. She cried when she remembered this. But no one knew if they were “Yards” who assisted the Americans, communists, or ordinary villagers and whichever, they were threatening to any of the groups, as if there had been no such thing any longer as a simple human being, a villager. The child she had been was an enemy to someone. Everyone was one kind of enemy or another. Even a child, a little girl who carried a jar with a red goldfish in it.
The flower business grew. As it became more prosperous, they built a wall and even a door that opened and closed. Lin arranged her place just so, everything in order, a teapot and two cups, a jar of flowers, a pillow, her box of things, including her father’s map and his name and address in America. Later the husband built Lin shelves for her things and added hooks for her clothing. Sometimes Lin made enough extra money at tips and small jobs that she could buy a Coca-Cola or, better, a silk blouse. Lin grew. She loved the returning forest and as she grew older she went there each day in the morning mist. Tall and narrow, with a single braid of black hair, she walked into the clouds. She returned looking radiant. Everyone noticed her. They saw her beauty.
“Isn’t our Lin lovely?” said the old man to his wife as she lavished cream on her face.
“Our Lin.” She snorted, unable to admit to herself her own feelings for the growing girl. And yet one day, a year or so back, she had gone to Lin’s mat and put her arm around the sleeping girl and cried into Lin’s hair. Lin heard her sobs.
In the hot afternoons after they closed down for a rest, all would bustle again. It rained. The streets ran with water. Now and then she’d still see an ox. Work lasted until night when everyone visited with their neighbors and talked about each other, how Doc Thin Yu’s daughter had come home, and how well they had done for the day. Even if they lied about it, even if their business was on the edge of broken, they said, “We had an excellent day.”
“Ours, too, was very good.”
The bread-baker had been a scholar once. A professor. She learned from him, even when school was still against the law in the changed world. At his place she looked at the globe. She closed her delicate eyes and she pointed. Turkey. She wanted to go there, and she would because, above all, in her softness, her greenness, she was stubborn and willful. She pointed again. Midland, Ohio. Maybe not. But then perhaps it was exotic. Perhaps it was close to her father. How she wanted to see him. But for now, she was happy enough riding her bicycle through city streets, getting off and pushing it, seeing the look of happiness pass over someone’s face when she delivered flowers for her boss woman, and looking at everything there was to see, women washing the windows of shops or cleaning the walk in front, green forcing its way through old stone.
Lin liked to watch the people mostly, a woman rushing by with a new haircut and a plastic bag of something no doubt beautiful in her slender right hand. Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, had changed.
And then she’d enter the trees and stop, enchanted. She walked the bike through this world. The trees were her place. Jungle was her blood. Ocean was, too, but she didn’t yet know it.
Lin had her father’s map, along with his photograph. She didn’t know that the dirty, folded, and rough-edged paper was a valuable thing. It was a book against the Americans. It told of those who crossed over into a country not theirs for war. It told of unlawful boundaries crossed, beliefs, places, and even bodies trespassed.
In class, it was easy for Lin to understand the dialects of others, as if some were a trace in her memory. And they also spoke English, from her childhood, but her own people had spoken many languages and dialects because they had to.
In her long-distant past old Uncle Song would gather them together and they would practice. “No, no,” he would say. “Do you want to get killed? You pronounce it this way or they will think you are an enemy.” They’d laugh. They couldn’t cry. It was a world of many enemies, each with their own intonation of voice, of belief, of hatred.
“Ha! I am an enemy!” said Auntie with great gusto, a woman with a white streak of hair who hated all those around them, but she then looked vulnerable and her lip didn’t hold as firm. Her face, the mask, would soften into nothing that hated, only what feared. Lin remembered this, even though at the time she was perhaps only five or six.
The older people already spoke French. “From before.” That was part of their history. Some even spoke Chinese, she was certain. But the man on the corner taught her new dialects and better French. She was a fast learner. Dr. Bread-baker also taught her algebra, her favorite because she was always seeking the mystery of x. It was the important factor in her life where everything was missing, lost, and sought-after. She was always searching, this young woman, this very fast learner he favored.
She looked up the word war and found that it meant confusion more than any other one verb and it was not the noun it was thought to be. It meant hostilities, armed battle. She had never understood why humans did not live in peace, which seemed so easy, so simple compared to war. She asked Dr. Thieu, the baker, and he said he believed it was in the human’s nature to seek power and to have greed. “Even a simple, peaceful woman or man will fight back when they see injustice or when something is taken from them,” he said. “Oh, I have come to believe it is a necklace of skulls, a chain linked together with no clasp, and it is so strong it can’t be broken. Humans are poor, unforgiving animals.”
And so Lin wanted to learn a way to break the chain. Everything must have a weakness somewhere. She was young and she thought, What if there were no injustices, what if there were wisdom?
Lin still asked about her uncle’s address, in vain. One man in English class said, “Oh no, I believe that’s in Hanoi.” It seemed so far away.
She saved her small wages and the tips given by those whose streets she still cleaned, even as a young woman, all the while watching the world grow back and be rebuilt, hearing the sounds of it, a nail at a time, a stone. This money, too, went in a small box and when she received enough coins she changed them to bills, and after a while she needed a second box. She spent little of the money, but now and then she gave some to the children of American fathers. She did buy a goldfish for her room, but soon it ended up sitting on the counter of the little shop. She thought it would be less lonely there. It attracted customers. It reminded her of her father. She could still recall him as he walked toward her, the red goldfish in a white bowl.
For a time after the war everything had been quiet. Too quiet. There were no birds. At first there was not even a breeze, as if the wind had gone to another part of the world. And when it was most silent, Lin remembered that her father became the wind. In every breeze that touched her.
Against the old woman’s rules, Lin’s body began to curve and swell. And now, whenever she could, she also worked in an office where people went to search for their families. At first she volunteered.
Her new mother, watching her study and read, said she was too greedy for knowledge. “It is not a good thing. How will you live if you know so much? You will never be happy. You will be a poor worker. You will never be a good wife.” But unlike the baker’s wife, Lin had a hunger that wanted to consume something and what it wanted to consume wasn’t rice in a bowl but learning, knowledge. Perhaps that was better because it kept her from remembering the burning sampans, the fires at nights, the sounds, her old grandmother floating away on the river to the unknown world of night and death, while she herself was pulled and pushed away to life.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Mother, her mistress of the flower shop. “I will stay here and care for you. I will care for you and Pa when you are old.” Lin saw the relief in the woman’s eyes. She had her losses, too, this mother did, too many to talk about. Lin must constantly reassure her.
And so, some days when Lin was called to help translate in the offices, at the desk where the terrible stories were told, this mother didn’t send her out with flowers. She had a secret pride in Lin’s success and so an overly tall boy down the street delivered the flowers instead.
Lin heard the stories: One small old man sat down at the table and opened a large bag and took out the bones of his ancestors, those bones that were left, and said how he couldn’t keep them clean enough. He didn’t notice if anyone in the room was disturbed by the bones. They weren’t. They’d all seen worse. He said, “The Americans dug them up because they knew, we cared for them, and one man peed on them.” He wept. The ancestors had been loved and buried with care. The bones were wiped clean with alcohol. He wanted to take them home. He cried and his hair was almost white. Lin understood him and translated what he said. This was a problem that could be solved. He could take them back, even if the place looked as if it was gone. They could arrange such a journey. Later, a scarred woman, a cut through her face, told about her lost children and she said she last saw them by a banyan tree. Lin said nothing, but she got up and went through files of children searching for their mother because she was certain she recalled a brother and sister saying something like that, and as she did a windstorm came up. They all went to the window and saw it rippling the water outside, some papers blowing across the streets and the people outside walking leaned against it, holding their hats and skirts to their bodies.
“I think I might have a lead,” Lin said, looking at the file. “I will come to your house tomorrow.” She believed this because it was a story told by two people who said they last saw their mother at the village tree just before there was a blast in the air and men came and took their mother away. At the time, they were just children left crying. She remembered this from the file. The tree was probably long since dead, but the children were now young people. She hoped she was right. She had the best of memories. It would be so good, it was so good, the few times she had seen people reunited with one another. She wished for her own father.
She went out in the early mornings while her new family slept, and took walks to where the forest was returning. She followed new roads and looked at the places people were rebuilding. After cleaning at the flower shop, after watching the owner make arrangements, after watering carefully all the plants, one day Lin made a beautiful flower arrangement with pale lotus blossoms and, instead of ribbon, she tied it with some of the wild green grasses, braided long and light, grasses from the forest. Surprised, the boss woman said, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, it looks like angels made it.”
One night, Lin met the man who would become her husband. It was his first night at the school. He was in the corner sitting on a crooked chair at their makeshift school. In one look she saw that somehow his eyes held her world or part of it. She knew what he knew. He knew what she did. Not in the way of school and learning, but in the world, in their lives and histories. Somehow he, too, had managed to survive. She didn’t know he had been an enemy. That he had been on the other side. The necklace of skulls suddenly had another strand. She didn’t know that he had wanted to be a doctor and then was forced to be a child-warrior in a child army. All she saw was the sweat on his forehead as he struggled over the words of English and his starched-collar white shirt was damp. Starch, she thought, he must have a wife or money enough to go to the laundry. Sweat. He must be having trouble with school. But in truth it was nerves from seeing her beauty and calm, like when the wind blows and water lilies fly across the water and onto the land, and what’s on land is blown into the water. Lin said, “Doesn’t that breeze cool you?” She pointed at the window and smiled at him to show that it wasn’t an insult. She thought he needed help reading and he was struggling with the work. He thought she was reading his thoughts and knew they were all about her. He said, “No, but I like the scent of flowers.” So forward he was being, but she thought he was a poet. What he meant was something with insight into her life, and it did have depth, as he smelled the scent about her as if he were a butterfly. Later they walked together and he said, “I am going to university. What should we do?”
She said, so bold she couldn’t believe she had even spoken the words, “I think we should get married.” Embarrassed, her face was hot and now she was the one in a nervous sweat.
“Yes. I know I have seen you before, but I can’t remember where.” Perhaps it was another lifetime. All he knew was that they were meant to be together. He didn’t know she was the child, years ago, on the bloody trail, the one he had picked up that he was supposed to kill or injure and not help, that even then when he looked into her face and felt her tiny arm, he could not harm her.
But Lin returned to herself. She was a young woman who had to hide her feelings. She wasn’t a tree, she was a pond, and he would have to walk all the way around her to know her.
He was a man who would do it.
He had his back to her the next day when she came to school and she did what her father used to do. She put her hands around his head and covered his very deep eyes and said, “Guess who?”
No one had ever done that to him before. Again he was sweating. He liked her sweet manners. She liked his kindness. He had never been to war, she was certain. Not with his manners. He had lived in France at one time. He said he could help her with French. She could help him with English. Of course, they were perfect for each other. She even remembered a few curse words. “Repeat this. ‘Oh shit,’” she said, and laughed out loud, a beautiful laugh.
Lin’s ambitions now bothered her mistress, who had forgotten her own ambitions of the past, and Lin knew it, so Lin offered the woman gifts and brought her food from Dr. Bread-baker, and called her Mother and sometimes felt bad, as if betraying her own mother, the memories, and her father’s fading photograph.
Over the years, the older woman’s face, once angry and thin, suspicious of everyone, had grown sad. Lin never knew how the older woman often stepped out the door and watched Lin go down the street to learn, thinking all the time, She will soon be gone. And later, the pain was even worse when Lin rode her bicycle to Han Son to interpret for the others. Oh, Mother was never stupid. She always knew Lin had gifts and talents beyond the art of flowers and stems. She was a girl who was good at anything and everything. That was her curse. It would lead her to all roads, like the veins of a leaf, all feeding one plant. But when Lin returned she always brought the woman something special. This time when she returned, the night of all the fretting and incense burning, it was sweet rice to make her happy, and Lin said she was already paid and was going to use some of the money to paint the counter and make it more lively and bright and she was happy and energetic and alive. She painted it the color of pale green with a hint of yellow. Lin said the color was chlorophyll and she’d just learned this word from leaves and school, and the woman who had known flowers so well loved the new word. Co-ro-f iu.
This time, too, when Lin came home she washed the woman’s hair outside in a basin of warm water, pouring it over her graying strands with a cup and noticing the thin back of her neck, the protruding bones there, the birthmark so many have in that place. A pale leaf fell into the tub of water and it seemed so much a part of them both. Lin offered the woman human comfort, the older woman who loved flowers and had spent years hating being alive, while Lin was surprised to have lived and had been thrilled when she remembered the bursts of fire and the rockets like falling stars, thrilled she survived them and proud of her abilities to live on streets, in trees, down roads, but there were other consequences and she hadn’t known what they were at first. Now she who had been without a family helped those who were helpless families find one another, and she swore upon the words of every dead and living savior that she would find her father.
Her adopted father had a calmness, too, not like a pond, or even a plant, not like Lin, but he had grown content with life. He alone noticed there were times when Lin was a restless pond underneath, not always a still one. He built things now. Especially he built birdhouses and he imagined them richly and elegantly. They were loved, pieced together by things he found thrown out on streets, pieces of cars, but somehow they always looked new and perfect. Lin loved him and remembered how he’d slipped her extra money when he could, money she used for books. He made a living room out in the back in a place that had been bare. Now they had enough, unlike before, and he grew flowers and ginger and he cared for the stone basin he kept filled with fresh water to attract the returning birds, and he even bought a TV.
“What would our ancestors think,” his wife said. “I won’t watch it. Ever.” She crossed her arms over herself the day he brought the square box home and turned it on.
She held out for three weeks and then one day she sat before it on the floor and watched so much he had to call her to her duties at work even in the daytime.
“Shh.” She waved him away with her narrow hand. “They are having a fight. She is sleeping with her doctor.”
“I had your future read by the woman who burns leaves on stones,” Mother told Lin one day.
“I heard she charges too much. Did she overcharge you?” Lin was a skeptic.
“Yes, of course she did. But I had to know.” She had a crease between her eyebrows which had disappeared. Then she kept silent, tempting Lin until her curiosity was too much for her. More silence. Until Lin couldn’t wait. “Okay, what did she say? What did you ask?”
“She said you would go a long ways. You would marry a man who was somehow an enemy, but the fights are over. You will grow even taller. How can you? I don’t know. She says you will always come home to flowers even if you go to school. You are meant for co-ro-fiu.”
Lin smiled without laughing. “And what about you?” She knew the woman would never ask only about the girl.
“Oh, I will live a long, long life and my hands will still be beautiful,” but she shook her head as if she had sad news she didn’t wish to tell. That was her way.
Lin wanted to go to a university. She didn’t need school, though. She already was finding her share of work. And she studied maps. The teacher, Dr. Thieu, over the years watched her with love that grew as Lin grew. Now he watched her grow into love with the young man who would become her husband.
Once, the two young people went to the park and, despite the others, they sang together. They knew all the same songs. Another time, they danced to the band that was playing there, a few men with instruments, a singing woman in a tight dress who lifted her arms like in a movie and sang in English. “You’re stiff,” he said, stepping back, looking at her gently.
“I’m nervous.” She felt embarrassed and again she was the one sweating.
It was a French dance. The air smelled of peach blossoms.
The streets were busy, but many had come to the dance and sat around on folding chairs or squatted on their own legs. Some of Lin’s people were there, the Ugly People, the tribes. No longer do we have or love nature, Lin thought when she saw those from places like her own. Now we just try to get by, like everyone, or to make money and build. After the reconciliation, comrades were forgotten, and everyone strove in new ways to survive. Some left to work on oil rigs in Thailand. Some worked for peace. Some built businesses. Some lost them.
When Lin and Tran married, they stepped on the pathway of flowers. All was flowers because Lin’s adopted mother insisted. It was a day of still ponds and plants. It was a day of baked food and a night of sweetness, even in the rains that fell.
Now, beneath the full moon, as she watches the bats, she is a young woman and she has done well with her life. She tells herself that she has made for herself a fortunate life. And it is true; this life was not given her, the girl who was once shoeless even though her mother had been a shoemaker. Now, she thinks, it is time to find her father.