THE WEEPING WILLOW draped like a curtain around Maia. She did not realize she was not alone until she heard murmuring and saw uniformed legs through the windblown branches. She quickly folded the letters and tucked them into a crevice under the roots that had grown above ground. She slipped out from beneath the canopy, over the riverbank, and into the water. Where she slid in, the lilies scattered and then slowly returned. By the time the men came and stood under the willow, the river was evenly covered again with blushing pink lotuses and expansive emerald pads from bank to bank.
As her feet hit bottom, she pulled her legs up and rolled forward. Hands clasped and then extended, she dolphin kicked beneath the water lilies and swam away from the bank. The hum of the river enveloped her. Her heart pounded with urgency as if ready to burst. She rotated onto her back and grabbed onto the rootstalks to keep from surfacing. When she lifted her mouth through a gap between the leaves to gulp in air, she saw Xuan and the Public Security Trio scanning the area. They exchanged words she could not hear. They retreated through the dragon fruit grove.
She floated in the river among the lilies, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. Her father’s letter had opened a floodgate of yearning that had been kept shut as they tried to rebuild their lives in America. When she left the river, she welcomed the warmth of the late afternoon. After some time under the sun, squeezing water from her clothes and untangling twigs and dead leaves and bugs from her hair, she settled again in the shadow of the weeping willow and retrieved the letters from the crevice. Reading several more letters from her father to her mother, Maia realized the isolation she felt while growing up in Philadelphia was in part because of her father’s sense of defeat. Escaping to America was not the beginning of a new life for him, but a coda to a life unlivable in his homeland, yet impossible elsewhere.
She came to the yellowing page torn from a notebook, her mother’s letter to her father.
I’ve been here for eight months and have written to you twice. I asked my sister to mail the letters. Have you received them?
For the past months, I was sent out to clear forests, plow fields, and plant crops. Each inmate is assigned an eighty-by-one-meter strip. In the morning when the sky is cool, the plowing isn’t bad, but in the afternoon, the heat makes it hard to breathe. Day after day, our work continues.
Recently, my duties have changed. I’ve been reassigned to the kitchen. There are ten of us: head chef, assistant chef, two pig caretakers, and six cooks, of which I’m one. I get up every morning at 4:30, divide the rice portions, carry water from the well, rinse the rice, boil four pots of water, and cook six pots of rice and vegetables for the whole day. At dawn, I carry vegetables from the field to the kitchen. At noon, I carry rice from the granary to the kitchen. The work is hard, especially sifting rice and bringing water in from the well, but not as hard as working in the field under the scorching sun.
Writing to you, I’m reminded of the time when we first met and the time we were away from each other. Already it’s been more than ten years—a period that seems long and far away, yet it also seems like yesterday. I’ve been a wife and a mother, but have I completed my duties?
Please don’t worry about me. Whatever situation I’m put into, I’ll stay composed and wait for the day to see you again. I’ll be brave and look straight ahead. I’m ready to accept what’s handed to me. Your love has been enough in the past and will be enough for the days to come even if I don’t see you again.
As the missing pieces fell into place, more questions arose. Why was her mother in prison? During those years apart, her parents’ letters had never reached one another but were collected in a dead letter box. Why?
It was evening when Maia left the riverbank to find the path back to the house. Tree branches rustled and shadows of laundry drying on the line wavered in the breeze. The songs of crickets, frogs, and birds filled the night. She listened for movements but only heard the crunching of pebbles beneath her feet and the slow creak of the plank when she stepped on the platform beside the well. She pulled at the rope that hung over the edge of the well and retrieved a bucket of water. She stripped, got onto her haunches and rinsed the mud off her shirt and pants, and then hung them to dry on the line. She fetched another bucket and poured the cool water over herself, washing the river’s debris from her hair, its crusty film on her skin, the dried silt between her toes. Standing under the quarter moon, all around her was a blur. “What if Má were still alive?” she whispered. That night, she felt closer to her mother than any of those nights when she gazed at the moon on the other side of the world.
“Be brave,” Má had said. “Look at the moon and you’ll see me.”
They huddled with others by the riverbank in the dark. Her mother held her hand, her father their few belongings. They were waiting to be taken to the big boat to cross the South China Sea.
In the distance, bright paper lanterns dangled to and fro, illuminating shadows of children celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1978.
When the outlines of two small boats appeared, she grabbed onto her mother’s slender finger and they waded together into the river mouth. The women and children were led toward one boat, the men toward the other. Standing in the water, her mother passed her to her father and bade him to board with the women and children. The middlemen objected until her mother climbed into the boat with the men that never made it out to sea.