It’s always the same dream. Except it’s not a dream; it happened. This moment again and again drifts back to me during restless, sleepless nights. I lie in bed, pushing covers onto the floor, and I remember. But I can’t really remember, even though I was there. My mother told me the story when I was a five-year-old boy, running around the dusty streets. It was her favorite story, and I plagued her with questions. So now it is, in fact, my own story.
You see, I’m probably a year old, living with my mother in Saigon. She’s nervous, a little frightened—she holds me too tightly, as though she knows she will not always have me in her lap, in her life.
I’ve just learned to crawl. The long war is over but the killing and screaming and pain never seem to end.
Her mother—or some older woman in the bombed-out neighborhood—tells her that the little boy will have a tough life now that the Americans have fled. My mother nods, her eyes dark with fear. She looks at the half-Vietnamese, half-white son she holds. She tightens her grip.
Everyone has a bowl of rice in the afternoon. The scarce drinking water is so murky some people spit it out, curse. The sweet aroma of jasmine battles the stench of burnt wood. The stone house where the baby is cradled is missing part of a wall.
“We’ll see his future.” The old woman takes the whimpering baby boy from his mother’s arms. What follows is familiar Vietnamese custom. Let the crawling baby reveal his destiny. People drift over, gathering outside the tiny house with the missing wall, the roof partially caved in. In the dusty, hard-packed courtyard, swept free of papers and chicken bones and dog droppings, the old woman draws a lopsided circle with a stick, positioning the boy in the center. He cries, looks for his mother, falls back onto his side, and then struggles to right himself. Five feet away, the women place small objects, speckled around the edge of the sloppy circle. My mother remembers a pencil, a stale moon cake, a bowl of rice, other bits and pieces. But over the years my dreams have added other items—crumpled paper money, a vial of some elixir, a torn newspaper. I add others with the years.
The mood is festive, buoyant. The neighbors watch. A woman slices an overripe mango; the juices run over her hands. Nearby some men abandon their game of tam cuc, leaving the cards still spread on the table. They joke, cigarettes bobbing in the corners of their mouths. My mother waits, but the baby doesn’t move. In a small voice she calls out to little Viet Van Lam, “Come, my boy, come.” The baby stares at her, a smile on his skinny face. Finally, joyful, he crawls.
They wait. The laughter stops. Now the baby will choose his life. They wait, believing. If the baby crawls to a pencil, he will become a writer, perhaps. If he crawls to a cake, a baker. Money—a banker. Rice—a farmer.
But there are traps, my mother whispers to me later. There are evil omens, symbols of darkness, of loneliness, of disease. Pieces of crumpled black crepe paper. A jagged rock from the nearby fields to suggest a life laid low by nagging want. The tattered shirt of a life of abject poverty, a seeker after alms. The incense stick of early mourning.
They watch. The baby crawls.
Grimy and gurgling, he approaches the bowl of rice. They nod approvingly. He will be a farmer in the fields outside Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Yes, a hard life, but respectable. A life of getting by.
But the toddler shifts direction. Suddenly, in a rush, he lunges toward a tiny wooden dragon painted deep black with a fiery-red shellacked tongue, shiny eyes, razor-sharp tail, and triumphant outstretched wings. With his thin little fingers the boy brushes the miniature emblem.
But then, turning slightly, he grabs a grotesque figurine, a black-stained gargoyle, a fearsome demon. An old farmer had tossed it onto the edge of the circle, this roughhewn clay figure, purposely awful, with its big head, bulging eyes, and terrifying grimace. This, they know, is darkness, evil. This, they know, is the path away from light. At that moment the people gasp, unhappy. The old woman closes her eyes. His mother starts to sob. For the baby has chosen a life of wrongdoing and woe, the sinister clay demon that foretells crime: thievery, brutality, lying, corruption, even murder.
No one breathes.
The boy holds the figurine over his head, waves it, while his mother weeps.
But then little Viet Van Lam grabs it with both hands and, displaying a strength not shown before, he smashes it to the ground, breaking off its head, snapping off the twisted arms. The demon lies broken by his bare feet, covered in dust. The boy looks for his mother.
She remembers that he grins as he grasps the wooden dragon, tightens his fingers around it.
Everyone starts to applaud. Laughs and yells. The men nod at the boy, grinning. The old woman leans into the mother he will lose within a few years. “Your son,” she whispers, “will be a policeman.” She touches the head of the little boy, now back in his mother’s lap, his unusual blue eyes wide and alert. “A seeker after justice,” she says. “Buddha’s boy.”