THIRD SISTER, SEWING BY HER FRONT DOOR in Can Tho merely looks up and nods when you walk through the unlocked front gate and into her sunlit courtyard.
“You’re here,” she says.
“Third Sister,” you reply in greeting, adding, “Father and Mother, how are they?”
“No different since I last wrote to you. He’s alive; as for mother, she’s getting more and more...” She puts down her needlework and leads you to the middle hall to see for yourself.
Your father, paralyzed by a series of strokes, is lying on his platform, propped on his side by pillows. Your mother, eyes closed, swings in a hammock strung beside the black wood divan. The windows are open, but still the room smells of old age, incontinence and impending death.
You kneel down on the floor between them. “Ba, Má, I’m home,” you say.
Your father blinks. You think you see a momentary spark of recognition in his eyes. On your mother’s face though there’s only confusion.
“It’s me, Youngest,” you say, bringing her hand up to touch your face and hair.
“No Sir. Don’t tease me just because I’m an old woman who can’t see,” she says. She traces her fingers around your eye sockets and across your softening jaw to show you she isn’t as senile as everyone fears. “You have my Youngest’s voice for sure, but my son is a young man and you’re not,” she explains. Bending forward, she sniffs at your nose and your mouth. “I never allowed my son to smoke or to drink. You, Sir, stink like a playboy. No, you’re not my son. I won’t let you trick me.” She folds her legs back up into the hammock and closes her eyes.
On hearing this, a loud gurgle erupts from your father. He begins coughing in great bellows which turn his face purple. Your Third Sister steps forward and lifts him up to clear his airways. From behind, you see your father’s face flopped loosely over your sister’s left shoulder. His eyes are wide open. Tears are streaming down his cheeks.
.....
Your father’s crying face hovers over you as you slip in and out of consciousness in the attic that was once your bedroom. Your sisters, who’d prepared your welcome feast, surround you, jostling to wipe away your sweat, quieten your thrashing limbs and cool your steaming brow. “It was something in the water... Perhaps in the vegetables... Just a stomach grown weak after years in America,” they whisper.
“It’s amoebic dysentery,” a grim-faced Ba Roi tells them. He shoos them off and claims you to watch over as assiduously as he might a valuable prisoner of war, to keep death at bay so you can be saved for later interrogation. He hydrates you, dripping water from fresh coconuts down your throat through the stems of water-swamp plants. To kill the infection, he chews up ginger and jungle leaves and spits the concoction directly from his mouth into yours. With his own hands he wipes you clean after every eruption of your bowels and changes and carries away the soiled banana leaves spread under your aching body. And as you burn and mutter with delirium, he sponges down your hot body and hums old fashioned lullabies to you.
In your lucid moments Ba Roi assails you with questions about your life in America. He takes out your letters, saved through the years, and pesters you to clarify what you’ve written about the machines you came across there. And, in a startling confession, he confides his disillusionment with the Revolution and the Party. “I suspected as much. And now, talking to you, I’m sure. If we’d let the Americans win the war we’d all have been better off.” He points with a sour grimace to the banana leaves lining your wooden bed. “Look at this. Fifteen years after the Revolution and we’re still lying on leaves, the same bed sheets I had in the jungle hospital.” His laugh afterwards is hoarse and laden with remorse.
.....
It’s your turn to feel remorse when, nursed back to health, you return to Saigon and visit Oldest Sister and her husband.
.....
It was in Oldest Sister’s and Oldest Brother-in-Law’s well-provisioned house that you spent your high school years. In that house down an alley in Saigon’s District Three, Oldest Brother-in-Law had first persuaded you to taste the wonders churned out by his cook—French charcuterie, explosive Northern gunpowder pickles made from fermented baby eggplants, Southern grilled quails and other exotic birds, and an uncountable variety of dumplings and cakes from Imperial Hue. It was from that house that Oldest Brother-in-Law ushered all of the members of the household—you, Loc, Huong, your Oldest Sister, her five children, and the maids— into the fleet of American donated police cars at his disposal and ferried you all to the city’s best-air conditioned theatre to enjoy the delights of Hollywood movies. It was in the dining room of that house, during the first Tết of Liberation, that you were forcefully reminded how badly you’d repaid that corrupt and cruel man’s generosity to you.
You were twenty-eight that New Year. As always, you ate khổ qua, bitter gourd, for the Tết re-union dinner... So bitterness would pass you by.
That year the khổ qua was so sharp Oldest Sister was convinced bitterness would pass all of you by, not just for the next twelve months but for many years to come. She had simmered it plain in water. The meat, just the half kilogram you brought home from work, had to be set aside for the obligatory New Year stew. Sugar couldn’t be found in the markets to make candied offerings, not even for the price of gold. You didn’t have enough money for boiled head-cheese or saucissons. All your savings had been converted—not once but twice—your total stock of paper money turned in and each adult given two hundred New Vietnamese Dong in exchange. It was just enough for a week of Russian barley or six bowls of good white rice for your Tết dinner meant for seven.
You sat down around Oldest Sister’s dining table, an incomplete circle. The head of the house, Oldest Brother-in-Law, was missing.
In the May following Liberation all former employees of the old government had been ordered to register for re-education. Not recognized yet as a hero of the revolution and still at your old job in the government machinery depot, you put your name down like everyone else. On the day itself, you and the few other engineers who hadn’t fled were ushered into the hall of your former high school to listen to the new minister of heavy industry speechifying on the revolutionary government’s policy of reconciliation. When the minister was done, you were sent home. In June, you were required to attend another course, ten days on the crimes of the Americans and their puppet regime. After the course all of you were corralled for another day to write essays on what you’d learnt. Again, after your essays were handed in, you were released. Re-education, you concluded, was time consuming but not life threatening.
When the directive for a third study session was announced in July, you had no qualms about signing up. Nor did you question Chú Hai’s advice for Oldest Brother-in-Law to come out of hiding in the countryside and register too. “The cadres have interviewed the neighbors. There’s no covering up your Oldest Brother-in-Law’s position in the old regime. Sooner or later, he’ll have to come home. Isn’t it better for him to regularize his status now? All he’ll suffer is a few weeks of re-education and then no more hiding, no more fear ...” he’d said, and you’d repeated to Oldest Sister.
The next day Oldest Brother-in-Law returned to go with you to the neighborhood pickup point. As stipulated in the announcement, both of you brought everything you needed for a thirty day stay—your own food, sleeping mats and towels, and enough money for incidentals. In addition, your bag contained two cartons of American cigarettes and a sealed envelope from Chú Hai. “Your status isn’t certain until we get official recognition of your role in the war,” he’d said. He pressed the cigarettes and envelope into your hands. “Use the packs in the first carton as gifts to the assistants. Tell them I’ve entrusted you with a personal message for the section head. When you meet him, present the other carton with my compliments and also this letter.”
You exhausted the first carton during a nerve-wracking morning being passed from one dour faced thick accented soldier to another. When finally you were brought in front of the section leader, a jungle bleached man in plain civilian clothes, he was hostile. “My men say you’ve been agitating them non-stop to give me a direct message from my comrade Trung,” he barked.
You forced yourself to lower your eyes, to be humble. You dug out the carton of cigarettes and placed it carefully on the man’s desk with two hands. “He asked you to accept these,” you said. Then you slid Chú Hai’s envelope under the carton, “... and also to take a look at this.”
The eyes behind the section head’s puffy lids gleamed at the sight of the envelope but his voice remained contemptuous. “You Southerners think everyone’s for sale.” His hand reached out to take the envelope. The short rough fingers hesitated as they pulled out the letter inside, one page thin with no enclosures.
You held your breath.
The man’s thick right index finger traced the lines of the message. Then he put the letter back into the envelope with more care than it was taken out. “Looks are certainly deceiving,” he said. He leaned over and pushed the carton of cigarettes on his table back to you. “Take these back. I don’t need them to know we can’t overlook anyone’s service for the revolution. Don’t worry, Young Brother. I’ll do what’s right by you.”
The section head was indeed a man who could discern right from wrong. When the cadres came in with their name lists late that evening, Oldest Brother-in-Law and you were separated. Along with a handful of other unlikely Northern sympathizers—an elderly engineer from the Port Authority, one of the former principals of the technical high school you’d gone to, and a group of Oldest Sister’s colleagues from the Women’s Hospital—you were asked to stand on the lead cadre’s left. Everyone else, including Oldest Brother-in-Law, was asked to squat down on the other side.
You’ve never forgotten how Oldest Brother-in-Law’s expression changed from confusion, to disbelief, to understanding and then to fury. How he jumped up and tried to scramble over the hunched down backs of the public works contractors, bank managers, hospital workers and post office supervisors, to get at you. And how he was knocked back with the butt of a soldier’s rifle and hauled into the truck taking them all away.
After a week, the medical workers were sent back, their identity documents stamped with the words ‘essential personnel’. After a month the neighbor opposite came home, thinner and more careful with his words, but otherwise healthy. But after six months, Oldest Brother-in-Law was still away.
In the third week, Oldest Sister had asked why you were let off when even the doctors were detained. In the second month, after having figured it out and cursing you for being a collaborator, she’d asked that you use your contacts to get Brother-in-Law released. In the fifth month, when her youngest son came home from school crying that he couldn’t have a red neck-scarf because his father was a class enemy, she stopped talking about her husband altogether.
During your pre-New Year visit to Chú Hai, he shared that Oldest Brother-in-Law was fine. “Not to worry, it’s just re-education,” he’d said. It was an insubstantial tid-bit he volunteered to salve his own conscience, unlike the two kilo bag of short grain American rice he pushed into your hands.”I’m a single man, what can I do with twelve kilos a month,” he said, shamefaced that the rations he received as a party member were three times your allotment as an engineer. “It’s not fragrant like our rice, but maybe your sister can use them for New Year cakes. Make a bánh tét to represent the South, a bánh chưng for the North.”
You didn’t remind him that Southerners rarely made the square Northern bánh chưng at home, or that Oldest Sister didn’t have enough fuel to boil up two cakes. After all, even Chú Hai had to toe the party line. You accepted the rice gladly and handed it to Oldest for her to do what she could with it. You didn’t repeat what he said about her husband to her. How reliable was his information these days?
Still, when everyone sat at table you were grateful Chú Hai had made it possible for you to have a rice cake for the New Year. It would have been too sad for the children if there was not even one. And Oldest Sister had tried her best. The children bit with gusto into the make-do roll she’d stuffed with a few unripe bananas scavenged from a neighbor’s tree. But when you picked up a slice for yourself, you found the cake hadn’t been boiled for long enough. The half-cooked grains of rice grated between your teeth and the unripe bananas stuck bitter against your tongue.
The memory of that meal grates now as you push open the decrepit gate hanging loose on its hinges, and see your Oldest Sister hunched over a tray, sorting husks of broken rice with fingers bent from arthritis.
She doesn’t notice you in the doorway. Her eyes are set on her task and she has two enormous ear-phones on, presumably to block out the martial music blaring from the community loudspeaker just outside the house.
“Oldest Sister,” you go to tap her shoulder.
“Trới đất ôi! Heaven and earth!” your Oldest Sister screams, tearing the headphones off her head and setting aside the tray of rice to stand up and kiss you on both cheeks.
You take a step back. You’ve always had a low tolerance for Oldest and her grand gestures.
“You’ve gotten thinner,” she says, clutching at your upper arm. “You’ve been ill?”
“Yes. I had a bout of dysentery,” you confess with reluctance. “In Can Tho.”
The goodwill disappears from her face. “You went there first without telling me? Surely you could have sent a messenger to tell me. I would have made an effort then to come to the hotel to see you, my own brother. I could have gone down with you in the van too, to the Delta. I haven’t seen our parents in ages. Don’t you know how difficult it is now to scrape the money together for a trip down?”
“I had work to do,” you say. A lame excuse, you know. In truth, you delayed your visit to Oldest because you’ve always felt she housed you on sufferance all your teenage years, and even afterwards, when your contribution to the household became essential after Brother-in-Law left for his mistress’ house. And then there’s your guilt over Oldest Brother-in-Law’s fifteen years in re-education...
“I didn’t know if Oldest Brother-in-Law would welcome me,” you say.
“Ah yes, your Brother-in-Law... I’ve told your Brother-in-Law that whatever you might have done before the war, he should understand it was because of your blood-father. And afterwards, when none of us could work because of his police background, he should be thankful your contributions to those people allowed you to keep your job.”
She rushes on in a more amenable tone, anxious not to create ruptures in a relationship which has ensured her family’s financial survival in recent years. “It’s only because of you we managed to keep body and soul together during these terrible times.” Tears begin to well up in her yellow tinged eyes. “Yes, only because of you...” she says, reaching over to pinch your cheeks with her swollen fingers.
Her performance is interrupted by a sudden loud keening from the back of the house.
“That man!” she shouts in exasperation. She bustles through the dining room and towards the noise.
You follow, curious.
The wailing is coming from the corner of the kitchen, from a lump of humanity hiding under a gunny sack.
Oldest Sister reaches down and flips the sack over with her foot. “Stop it,” she says to Oldest Brother-in-Law. “It’s just the music from the neighborhood propaganda loudspeakers. You’re not back at the re-education camp, do you hear me?” She pulls her disoriented crying husband to a sitting position. “See. Youngest is home. What kind of welcome are you giving him?”