IN THE TIME YOU’RE BURIED in the countryside, Nina is wearing herself out, imagining you embroiled in all kinds of cloak and dagger situations. When finally she receives the laconic telegram you send from Ho Chi Minh City saying you’ve just been delayed with your family in Can Tho, she’s so angry she tears it up and flushes the pieces down the toilet.
You don’t know that then. You don’t get a call back from her afterwards, screaming, to tell you. You find out three days later when you’re in Bangkok with access to a direct dial line and can’t get through to your house.
Worried, you contact Loc and ask him to drive up the Canyon to check on her.
“The phone isn’t working,” she tells him at the front door, chilly and distant.
“He was near death from dysentery,” Loc has to plead before she agrees to go back with him, to speak to you from his apartment.
“After your stupid telegram, I disconnected the phone. I didn’t feel like I wanted, ever, to speak to you again,” she tells you when Loc puts her on the line.
Her voice is dripping icicles. She doesn’t ask about your dysentery or express concern that you would’ve died but for Third’s careful nursing. You can’t know she crawled into bed with Tri the night she tore up the telegram and cried herself to sleep on his pillows.
She proceeds to tell you breezily that her supervisory board has finally approved the dissertation—‘The war for minds: links between individual susceptibility to enemy propaganda and the onset of post traumatic stress’—and she’s now looking for post-doctoral positions in academia.
She doesn’t seem to hear the panicked,“Why? I thought you promised to come at Christmas,” that you try to interject into the conversation.
“No more veterans and no more counseling. I’m done with picking up after wars. Yours, Papa’s and Maman’s, anyone’s... I’m not even thinking about collecting data from those new migrants flooding Little Saigon nowadays,” she tells you.
You know the migrants she means, veterans on the Orderly Departure Program, released from re-education camps to go to America under US government sponsorship. Men with haunted faces, tense jaws and shoulders held into their chests. Men who’ve been kicked and beaten too long and now will hit back if they’re even touched. Men like your Oldest Brother-in-Law in Saigon keening under a gunny sack in his kitchen. They’re ideal subjects for a paper on the Southern view of the war, if Nina wants to write one. You can’t believe she’s choosing to ignore them.
“Cutting off your nose to spite your face?” you can’t resist asking.
She ignores the dig.
Instead, she begins to tell you how well Loc’s and Huong’s manicure shop near Koreatown in Los Angeles is doing, and how Huong is hopeful that before long she and Loc will be able to move out of their Federal Housing Assistance apartment and back into a house of their own. “So sweet,” she enthuses, venom in her voice. “Not like some of us who’re being forced to dismantle our homes for no reason at all.”
Talking to her is a waste of Loc’s dollars, you think to yourself.
“Can you please put Loc on? I’ve got some things to tell him about Oldest’s family,” you say to her, hurt and brusque.
“I finally went to visit Oldest Sister the day before I left Vietnam. Oldest Brother-in-Law’s in a bad way. After fifteen years of re-education, his nerves are totally shredded,” you tell Loc. “The best option for him is the ODP program. I’ll help with the processing and take care of the expenses in Vietnam and the flight out, but can you co-ordinate the paperwork on the US side?” you ask.
“Adding another hothead to the mess of hotheads already here,” Loc says. “They’ve just set up a new front in California, an overseas resistance army, they call it. They’re going to punish anyone found collaborating with Vietnam. You may not get a good return for your kindness,” he warns.
“I owe him. I was the one who got him sent to reeducation,” you reply. You change the subject. “It’s not him I’m worried about at the moment. It’s my wife. She’s on fire.”
“Yes, the worst kind... cold fire,” Loc agrees. He advises, “You should call her more often. These Americans, they’re on the phone all the time. She talks to her mother twice a week. You’re her husband. She expects more.”
You’ve already passed your fortieth birthday, but still your brother feels it’s his duty to tutor you on the behavior suitable for a married man.
“I suppose...” you reply.
.....
Nina is smooth with her denials when next you call, a short one day after your gall-spattered exchange.
“I wasn’t angry. I just realized burrowing around in other people’s wounds isn’t the best way to understand myself. I’m always telling my patients they can’t make something out of what isn’t there. Your war isn’t part of my experience. I’m not going to know myself any better even if I spend a lifetime digging around in it. What I need is to go into myself.” She begins to throw out a jargon laden explanation. “There’s a Jungian process for that. It’s called individuation, bringing all the disparate parts of the self together.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” you say, careful not to commit to anything.
“Uh-huh. So I’m looking at post-doc training positions with that specialty.”
You don’t dare ask how she’s going to do that and still join you in Asia with Tri. “You’re still planning to come over for Christmas aren’t you?” you venture.
“The tickets are booked,” she replies.
It’s a yes, but not quite. You decide to take the answer at face value. Perhaps at Christmas, without a long distance phone line to protect her, she’ll chicken out. Perhaps she’ll change her mind about this terrible path she seems already set on. You hope.
When your family emerges into the spanking new second terminal of Singapore airport and you see Nina, you’re certain your hopes will be fulfilled. She’s standing tall and straight again, the pall of depression lifted from her. Her upper arm muscles are firm and the skin on her legs, arms and neck is shining with good health. Her face is relaxed, her eyes smiling the same way they had when she welcomed you in New York City. She’s in good humor, her lips curved up at something Tri’s saying.
She comes to hug you lightly after Tri’s dutiful greeting. Yes, she likes everything, she professes—the airport, the flowers, your new haircut and your weekend polo shirt and khakis. “A new image,” she says with approval. She likes everything... except the chauffeur driven company Jaguar which has hugely impressed your son. That elicits just a dismissive shake of her head.
Something is different. You search her face, wondering what has changed. “You’ve cut away your hair.” You reach out to touch the short feathery ends. Is that it, what is not quite right about your wife?
She bends her head forward to show off an elegant white nape. “I wanted to look more like a PhD, grown up. How could you not have noticed? I thought, with all that practice, you’d be more observant,” she raises a trimmed eyebrow at you.
Possibly, you worry, she hasn’t forgiven or forgotten everything.
But that spark of acidity is the only sign she gives during the holiday of anything wrong between the two of you. During your months apart, Nina has relaxed and detached in a strangely positive way. She no longer frets about things going wrong nor becomes anxious and distressed when they do. While you remain gripped by the need for absolute harmony and order, even in the placement of the chopsticks on a restaurant table, without Nina responding to your every little burst of irritation, your little explosions of temper can only seem petty. They cannot hover, turn toxic or pollute.
“We are having the best time peacefully ever,” Tri says on behalf of all of you, in the middle of eating an ice slurpy.
“Well I’m glad,” you reply. You’re more than glad, even if it isn’t due to any improvement in your disposition.
“Yes you are.” He nods, acknowledging the congruence between your words and inner state. He turns to Nina. “He’s not telling lies for once.”
You watch your son close his eyes, turn his face up to the sun and begin to carefully lick the syrup from the slurpy off his fingers. It is one of those rare instances when you can read the expression on his face. He is happy.
When night falls, Nina allows you to make love to her with a disengagement that drives you wild, letting you possess and punish her without compunction for all your time apart. If you feel any uneasiness about her curious new state of being, your insecurities are calmed when, decorating the plastic tree she finds in a supermarket, she produces the crystal star from your past Christmases in California and hands it to you to put up. All your residual fears disappear during a sultry midnight Christmas service when she pulls your face against hers and wishes you a Happy Christmas with an open-mouthed American kiss, in full view of the mostly Asian congregation.
It seems she wants your idyll to continue forever. Sitting in a coffee shop at the airport hours before she and Tri are due to fly, watching Tri browse through the shelves in the adjoining bookstore, you realize you haven’t resolved anything at all about the family coming to Singapore.
“As intended. I’m not coming back. Not to stay, anyway.” Nina says.
You’ve known all along this would happen. But, still, you’re not prepared.
“I spent the fall sending out job applications,” she confesses. “I applied for a therapist position in Manhattan that includes post-doctoral training at the Institute for Individuation. Although it was just a whim, I got it.”
Your jaw goes slack. “New York City’s dangerous. You won’t manage. Not with Tri the way he is.”
But the promise of that word ‘individuation’ seems to have imprinted itself onto your wife in the same seductive way the bone circlet on your thigh had so many years ago. “I lived there before. We’ll manage,” she says, her black eyes turning a dark determined jet.
You can’t argue. When she had asked how she and Tri would cope with you flying away to Vietnam, that was the answer you’d given—“We’ll manage.”
“It’s not that I’ve stopped loving you. And I don’t have anyone else. It’s just that I need some time to myself,” she forestalls before you even ask. “I’ve spent all these years trying to understand you and it didn’t even turn out to be you at all. I should have spent that time finding out about myself, why Vietnam and the war is such an issue with me. I’m going to take that time now.” She raises her hand, then puts it down again in a gesture of helplessness. “I can’t be around you to do it. I see you doing all the things you usually do, being the person I thought I married. Then it comes to me that it’s Thong the communist spy saying this, thinking that. I need distance to see both of us clearly,” she says. “And full disclosure from you,” she concludes.
What she wants is your blessing, so she can go without guilt, you think. “Running doesn’t help. It would be better if you stayed,” you start to say. But would it really? Can you promise that if she stays you’ll let her see you whole? To promise that, you’ll have to tell her about Julia Anderson and Chú Hai and the chicken and more; about the life you’ve begun to reclaim and store in hotel envelopes; the life still waiting to be written into the empty pages of your journal. And if you do, how can you be sure she’ll still love you, Nina the daughter of Hue, the Ai Nguyet look-alike?
“Are you asking me for a divorce? I won’t give you one, you know,” you say, as if what you want or don’t, matters under California law. But you say it anyway.
“No. I don’t want a divorce. I just want some time to myself, and to move to a new job in New York City,” she replies. She adds, “We might need to sell the house, if you agree...”
“Alright. And you and Tri will still visit?”
She nods. “Full disclosure, that’s what I need. Not right away, but over time. You can write it down in letters if it’s easier that way.”
“Are you sure? What about this morning, last night, all the other nights these two weeks?”
She smiles the saddest smile, bends across the tiny coffee table between you and brushes her lips against yours. “You, of all people, should know how easy it is to sleep with the enemy. The difficulty is living with a stranger.”
You raise your hand to the unaccustomed coolness of her bare nape, so vulnerable you can separate the bones underneath with a single twist if you want to. You pull her face against yours and bury your nose in her flesh, a Vietnamese kiss... taking her essence in to remember her by.
You want to hold her there all day, but Tri’s back from the bookstore.
“It’s time,” he says, pointing to the blinking alarm on his watch.
With him, it’s futile to haggle for even an extra second. You let Nina go.
“I won’t remain a stranger,” you manage to whisper in her ear.
You don’t know what full disclosure entails or even if you have the capacity to do it. You can’t be sure who the self Nina’s intending to discover will be. But going forward you will try to share what you can with whoever she becomes.
It’s the only way you’ll get your wife and your son back, you tell yourself, as you walk them to the departure gate.