MAIA’S NIGHT WAS full of voices that vanished when Na woke her. The voices had clarity in her dream but their meanings now blurred. Na had not slept, yet she seemed wide-awake.
They explored the empty longhouse and surroundings and ate the mung bean glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaves that were left on the table for them. They found the Minsk fixed and a note on its teardrop tank: Follow Route 14 southward if lost.
From Loc Ninh, they rode eastward along the watercourse and arrived at Lake Waterfall Dreams. “Is there a prison somewhere before the Be River empties into Lake Waterfall Dreams?” Maia asked the man at the hydropower plant. As soon as she repeated Auntie Mao’s words aloud, Maia realized she needed more details. After whispering these directions, Auntie Mao had only added, “I visited your mother once, and that was over ten years ago.”
“The Be River flows from north to south,” the hydropower plant worker corrected Maia, “from Lake Waterfall Dreams through the southeastern provinces. You’re lost, aren’t you?”
He pointed them to Route 14.
When the Ho Chi Minh Trail was renovated after the war, people began to settle along the newly paved thoroughfare. Route 14, an alternative to National Highway 1 on the coastline, connected the South and North through the Central Highlands. The former trails of human sacrifice now attracted resettlement, local businesses, and international golf course development.
Following Route 14 southward, they passed roadside eateries, garden cafés, sundry stores, bicycle and motorcycle repair shops, and building supply factories. There were gas stations with adjacent bright castle-like homes and gold shops with lit-up display glass cases. They passed houses that were shacks, others were bare redbrick, and some had sleek wrap-around tiled porches. Open doorways and curtainless windows faced the thoroughfare.
Na steered the Minsk off Route 14 and onto a red dirt path cutting through lush fields of coffee, black pepper, and durians. Away from the main access were mostly thatched huts. They passed a woman on a bicycle, whose face was shaded by a straw cone hat. They went by an old man pedaling a rickshaw with a heap of wilting root vegetables in the front wooden cart. They sped by people carrying baskets full of assorted wares, all walking toward the main road.
They came upon the edge of a rubber plantation. The paved road leading into the cultivated area was wide enough for large vehicles. Everything lay in shadow under the canopy of rubber trees, whose trunks were slashed diagonally about four feet above the ground, where metal pipes had been inserted to drain the latex into half bowls. They passed a truck with three large metal tanks and came upon a group of workers. When asked for directions to the prison, no one knew. The workers’ accents told them they were from northern provinces. Following the road, Maia and Na emerged from the plantation onto another dirt path, looping back to Route 14.
At a one-pump gas station, they learned that the prison had been closed. The station’s owner, the town’s highest-ranking official, pointed to the rubber forest as the prison’s former location.
“Mother is ready!” the official’s wife called from the brick house behind the station. Through the open door, Maia and Na could see people huddling in the living room, transfixed by a white robed dwarf sitting in a lotus pose.
A battered van swerved along Route 14. A young girl swung from its open side door, slapping on the metal panel to clear motorists and pedestrians from the van’s path. The van came to a stop at the station, and the girl leaped off and scurried in her flip-flops to open the back door for an old woman. The girl scaled barefoot atop the vehicle, untied a large covered basket, and balanced it on the woman’s turbaned head. The woman hastened away, anticipating the afternoon storm.
“Going to the Central Highlands?” the girl called, grabbing Maia’s bag.
Maia pulled back on the bag.
The girl held on. “Buôn Ma Thuột? Pleiku? Kon Tum?”
“Hurry!” Na pulled Maia’s arm the other way toward the house. “The dwarf is going to mediate with the dead!”
When the driver beeped the horn, the girl let go of Maia’s bag and chased after the van, jumping on as it set out northward for the highlands.
Inside the house, red electric candlelight from the altar lit the living room. A six-foot-high shelf, the altar extended from wall to wall and displayed two gilded portraits: an elderly couple in traditional Chinese gowns and skullcaps, and a young man in a heavily decorated uniform of the Peo ple’s Army. The young man had the same fine features as the town official.
The dwarf climbed onto the table that had been pushed against the wall beneath the altar. He stood no more than three feet tall but now gazed directly into the eyes of the old couple and young man. The town official remained beside the dwarf, waiting for directions.
“They were comrades-in-arms during the war,” someone whispered. “He was escorted from the City of the Soaring Dragon.”
Smoke from burning incense filled the room. People shuffled sideways, forming two single files, their backs against the wall. The town official beckoned the first woman to approach and told her to address the dwarf as Mẹ.
Na’s eyes were glued to the altar. Maia watched the solemn ritual while listening to the rain outside. Another express van heading to the highlands stopped for fuel.
“Mẹ,” said the young woman, palms clasped and eyes looking up, “when is the appropriate time for me to remarry?”
The dwarf replied in a high female voice from the back of his throat, “The eighth month of the Lunar Year of the Water Monkey.”
“Mẹ,” asked a thin man, “what is the course of the lotus, the palm, and the desert?”
“You play ball—rough and hard.”
When Na’s turn came, she spoke softly so that no one but the dwarf could hear. He placed his big hand on her left breast and responded in a barely audible whisper, “With you.”
The earnestness loosened Maia’s guard, and the question she had carried since she left Vietnam as a child with her father surfaced. “Thưa Mẹ, má con bây giờ ở đâu?”
The room became a blur in the haze of incense smoke. The dwarf lit a leaf of paper money and waited for it to burn. After gazing into the faces of the old dead and the young dead, he drew on a square sheet of paper at length with wild gestures.
He held it over the flame. A corner began to curl and darken, but before the sheet caught fire, loud gurgling rose from the dwarf’s stomach, and his eyes rolled uncontrollably, showing their whites. He fell off the table onto the tile floor with a thud. His body convulsed, his hand still clutching the square sheet of blackened paper.
Women gathered around him, untied his robe, and rubbed White Flower Balm on his body, from his broad chest downward. Fragrances of camphor, wintergreen, and eucalyptus filled the air. A woman massaged his short legs and big feet, another his arms and hands. The dwarf stopped convulsing, his breathing long and deep.
Someone gasped. Another giggled.
“Flip him over,” Na ordered the group, and they quickly turned the dwarf onto his stomach. A few proceeded to knead his muscly buttocks and thighs. Na directed two young women to carry the dwarf from the room. Maia got up to follow.
“You stay.” A man grabbed her hand.
The television and VCR were pushed back into the corner, and a karaoke bar with large speakers was set up. Women entered with round aluminum trays of food, and men lugged in cases of Tiger Beer, snake wine, moonshine made from glutinous rice, and a block of melting ice. A clay charcoal stove was placed at the center of the room. The official’s wife lit the charcoal briquettes, fanned them to a slow burn, and began grilling dried squids, fresh mussels, and a snakehead wrapped in banana leaves.
“What’s your business at the prison?” the man asked Maia.
“I’m just visiting.” She kept her eyes on the doorway where Na and the women had exited with the dwarf.
“You look like Đêm Đông,” he said.
“‘Winter Night’—the song?”
“An inmate. You two could be related.”
Maia turned toward him.
“I delivered beer and cigarettes to the prison guards,” he said. “There was a woman called Đêm Đông because each night you could hear her sing ‘Winter Night’ in her cell. You have her eyes.” He hummed a few bars and gazed at her. “The warden was in love with Đêm Đông. The last I heard he opened a nightspot in Ho Chi Minh City and called it the Winter Night Café.”
Past midnight, Maia and Na huddled outside the one-pump gas station, waiting for daylight. They had refused the town official’s invitation to crash on the living room floor with other intoxicated guests. Instead, they propped themselves against the pump under the drizzling rain and a waning crescent moon.
“Time for yourself,” the Independent Vietnam Coalition had agreed, “to visit family and resolve whatever questions you might have. Whatever you do, be at the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.”
This time for herself had not resolved anything but only made her more confused. Route 14 would take her to the peak via Buon Ma Thuot. But Ho Chi Minh City beckoned. She wanted to confront Uncle Mao.
Na, glowing after leaving the dwarf, looked blissfully vacant.
“Why did you carry him from the room?” Maia asked.
Na smiled.
“Oh no,” Maia said. “Don’t tell me.”
Na lifted her face, closed her eyes, and opened her mouth to catch the cool raindrops.
“Okay,” Maia said. “Did you . . . ? Is it true that . . . ?”
“It’s so hot, Mai.” Na gathered her long wavy hair and twisted it into a loose knot. “Are you cold? You should’ve come with us, the girls and me. It opens and vibrates and releases you to our inter-be. JP said that you’re—” Something fell from Na’s bra. “Oh, here.” She handed Maia a crumbled piece of singed paper.
“What did JP say?” Maia smoothed the wrinkled square on which the dwarf had made an elaborate drawing.
“Oh, I forget.” Na flicked her hand. “He doesn’t understand you.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Can you read that?”
Maia examined the script of overlapping characters. She could not tell whether they were Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, Cyrillic, or a combination of all those scripts. The writing was indecipherable.
“Mother said my father is with me,” Na said.
“Your mother said your father is with you?”
“No. Mother Medium, the dwarf, said my father’s here.”
“In Vietnam?”
Na took Maia’s hand and placed it on her chest. “He’s here.”
They listened to the wind howling through the deserted streets.
After a long silence, Maia said, “My father is with me, too. I have his ashes.”
“Now I understand,” Na said. “Your father, I saw him, a big black man.”
“My father’s Vietnamese, a small man with light skin.”
“No. No. I saw a big black man with you the first time you walked into the café with JP.”
“Sing us a song, Na. Sing us ‘Đêm Đông.’”
In the early morning, Na sang of an evening that had not gone, yet the night curtain had fallen. She sang of a winter night on which a soldier longed for his homeland, a wife waited across the river, a poet listened to his soul, and a singer sang to her mirror reflection.
Winter night, I yearn for the road that leads to the distant past.
Winter night, I dream a dream of a loving family.
Winter night, I drift through the wind and dust of a foreign land.
Is there someone wandering on a winter night without a home?9