Ru: A Novel Part 1

Ru.

Kim Thuy.

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns.

I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.

I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life's duty was to prolong that of my mother.

My name is Nguyn An Tnh, my mother's name is Nguyn An Tnh. My name is simply a variation on hers because a single dot under the i differentiates, distinguishes, dissociates me from her. I was an extension of her, even in the meaning of my name. In Vietnamese, hers means "peaceful environment" and mine "peaceful interior." With those almost interchangeable names, my mother confirmed that I was the sequel to her, that I would continue her story.

The History of Vietnam, written with a capital H, thwarted my mother's plans. History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago. It also stripped our names of their meaning, reducing them to sounds at once strange, and strange to the French language. In particular, when I was ten years old it ended my role as an extension of my mother.

Because of our exile, my children have never been extensions of me, of my history. Their names are Pascal and Henri, and they don't look like me. They have hair that's lighter in colour than mine, white skin, thick eyelashes. I did not experience the natural feelings of motherhood I'd expected when they were clamped onto my b.r.e.a.s.t.s at 3 a.m., in the middle of the night. The maternal instinct came to me much later, over the course of sleepless nights, dirty diapers, unexpected smiles, sudden delights.

Only then did I understand the love of the mother sitting across from me in the hold of our boat, the head of the baby in her arms covered with foul-smelling scabies. That image was before my eyes for days and maybe nights as well. The small bulb hanging from a wire attached to a rusty nail spread a feeble, unchanging light. Deep inside the boat there was no distinction between day and night. The constant illumination protected us from the vastness of the sea and the sky all around us. The people sitting on deck told us there was no boundary between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. No one knew if we were heading for the heavens or plunging into the water's depths. Heaven and h.e.l.l embraced in the belly of our boat. Heaven promised a turning point in our lives, a new future, a new history. h.e.l.l, though, displayed our fears: fear of pirates, fear of starvation, fear of poisoning by biscuits soaked in motor oil, fear of running out of water, fear of being unable to stand up, fear of having to urinate in the red pot that was pa.s.sed from hand to hand, fear that the scabies on the baby's head was contagious, fear of never again setting foot on solid ground, fear of never again seeing the faces of our parents, who were sitting in the darkness surrounded by two hundred people.

Before our boat had weighed anchor in the middle of the night on the sh.o.r.es of Rach Gia, most of the pa.s.sengers had just one fear: fear of the Communists, the reason for their flight. But as soon as the vessel was surrounded, encircled by the uniform blue horizon, fear was transformed into a hundred-faced monster who sawed off our legs and kept us from feeling the stiffness in our immobilized muscles. We were frozen in fear, by fear. We no longer closed our eyes when the scabious little boy's pee sprayed us. We no longer pinched our noses against our neighbours' vomit. We were numb, imprisoned by the shoulders of some, the legs of others, the fear of everyone. We were paralyzed.

The story of the little girl who was swallowed up by the sea after she'd lost her footing while walking along the edge spread through the foul-smelling belly of the boat like an anaesthetic or laughing gas, transforming the single bulb into a polar star and the biscuits soaked in motor oil into b.u.t.ter cookies. The taste of oil in our throats, on our tongues, in our heads sent us to sleep to the rhythm of the lullaby sung by the woman beside me.

My father had made plans, should our family be captured by Communists or pirates, to put us to sleep forever, like Sleeping Beauty, with cyanide pills. For a long time afterwards, I wanted to ask why he hadn't thought of letting us choose, why he would have taken away our possibility of survival.

I stopped asking myself that question when I became a mother, when Dr. Vinh, a highly regarded surgeon in Saigon, told me how he had put his five children, one after the other, from the boy of twelve to the little girl of five, alone, on five different boats, at five different times, to send them off to sea, far from the charges of the Communist authorities that hung over him. He was certain he would die in prison because he'd been accused of killing some Communist comrades by operating on them, even if they'd never set foot in his hospital. He hoped to save one, maybe two of his children by launching them in this fas.h.i.+on onto the sea. I met Dr. Vinh on the church steps, which he cleared of snow in the winter and swept in the summer to thank the priest who had acted as father to his children, bringing up all five, one after the other, until they were grown, until the doctor got out of prison.

I didn't cry out and I didn't weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner in his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don't hear us, don't speak to us, even though they're neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, nor smiling at them because every one of their senses would be a.s.saulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our hearts. Probably he'll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can p.r.o.nounce the word poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time. He won't know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible.

Already, I am defeated, stripped bare, beaten down.

When I saw my first s...o...b..nks through the porthole of the plane at Mirabel Airport, then too I felt naked, if not stripped bare. In spite of my short-sleeved orange pullover purchased at the refugee camp in Malaysia before we left for Canada, in spite of my loose-knit brown sweater made by Vietnamese women, I was naked. Several of us on the plane made a dash for the windows, our mouths agape, our expressions stunned. After such a long time in places without light, a landscape so white, so virginal could only dazzle us, blind us, intoxicate us.

I was as surprised by all the unfamiliar sounds that greeted us as by the size of the ice sculpture watching over a table covered with canapes, hors d'oeuvre, tasty morsels, each more colourful than the last. I recognized none of the dishes, yet I knew that this was a place of delights, an idyllic land. I was like my son Henri: unable to talk or to listen, even though I was neither deaf nor mute. I now had no points of reference, no tools to allow me to dream, to project myself into the future, to be able to experience the present, in the present.

My first teacher in Canada walked with us, the seven youngest in the group of Vietnamese, across the bridge that led to the present. She watched over our transplantation with all the sensitivity of a mother for her premature baby. We were hypnotized by the slow and rea.s.suring swaying of her shapely hips, her round and generous behind. Like a mother duck, she walked ahead of us, asking us to follow her to the haven where we would be children again, simply children, surrounded by colours, drawings, trivia. I will be forever grateful to her for giving me my first desire as an immigrant: to be able to sway my b.u.m the way she did. Not one of the Vietnamese in our group possessed such opulence, such generosity, such nonchalance in her curves. We were all angular, bony, hard. And so when she bent down to me, placing her hands on mine to tell me, "My name is Marie-France, what's yours?" I repeated each of her syllables without blinking, without needing to understand, because I was lulled by a cloud of coolness, of lightness, of sweet perfume. I hadn't understood a word she'd said, only the melody of her voice, but it was enough. More than enough.

When I got home, I repeated the same sequence of sounds to my parents: "My name is Marie-France, what's yours?" They asked me if I'd changed my name. It was at that split second that my present reality caught up to me, when the deafness and muteness of the moment erased my dreams and thus the power to look ahead, to look far ahead.

My parents, though they already spoke French, could not look far ahead either, for they'd been expelled from the Introduction to French course, that is, struck off the list of people who would receive an allowance of forty dollars a week. They were overqualified for the course but underqualified for everything else. Unable to look ahead of themselves, they looked ahead of us, for us, their children.

For us, they didn't see the blackboards they wiped clean, the school toilets they scrubbed, the imperial rolls they delivered. They saw only what lay ahead. And so to make progress my brothers and I followed where their eyes led us. I met parents whose gaze had been extinguished, some beneath the weight of a pirate's body, others during the all too many years of Communist re-education camps-not the war camps during the war, but the peacetime camps after the war.

As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us. They treat us like enemies when it suits them, with no concern for the definition or the role we give them. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't take too much stock in the appearance of one or the other to decide our views. I was lucky enough to have parents who were able to hold their gaze steady, no matter the mood of the moment. My mother often recited the proverb that was written on the blackboard of her eighth-grade cla.s.s in Saigon: i la chin trn, nu bun la thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.

My mother waged her first battles later, without sorrow. She went to work for the first time at the age of thirty-four, first as a cleaning lady, then at jobs in plants, factories, restaurants. Before, in the life that she had lost, she was the eldest daughter of her prefect father. All she did was settle arguments between the French-food chef and the Vietnamese-food chef in the family courtyard. Or she a.s.sumed the role of judge in the secret love affairs between maids and menservants. Otherwise, she spent her afternoons doing her hair, applying her makeup, getting dressed to accompany my father to social events. Thanks to the extravagant life she lived, she could dream all the dreams she wanted, especially those she dreamed for us. She was preparing my brothers and me to become musicians, scientists, politicians, athletes, artists and polyglots, all at the same time.

However, far from us, blood still flowed and bombs still fell, so she taught us to get down on our knees like the servants. Every day, she made me wash four tiles on the floor and clean twenty sprouted beans by removing their roots one by one. She was preparing us for the collapse. She was right to do so, because very soon we no longer had a floor beneath our feet.

During our first nights as refugees in Malaysia, we slept right on the red earth, without a floor. The Red Cross had built refugee camps in the countries adjoining Vietnam to receive the boat people-those who had survived the sea journey. The others, those who'd gone down during the crossing, had no names. They died anonymously. We were among those who had been lucky enough to wash up on dry land. We felt blessed to be among the two thousand refugees in a camp that was intended to hold two hundred.

We built a cabin on piles in an out-of-the-way part of the camp, on the side of a hill. For weeks, twenty-five members of five families working together, in secret, felled some trees in the nearby woods, then planted them in the soft clay soil, attached them to six plywood panels to make a large floor, and covered the frame with a canvas of electric blue, plastic blue, toy blue. We had the good fortune to find enough burlap and nylon rice bags to surround the four sides of our cabin, as well as the three sides of our shared bathroom. Together, the two structures resembled a museum installation by a contemporary artist. At night, we slept pressed so close together that we were never cold, even without a blanket. During the day, the heat absorbed by the blue plastic made the air in our cabin suffocating. On rainy days and nights, the water came in through holes pierced by the leaves, twigs and stems that we'd added to cool it down.

If a ch.o.r.eographer had been underneath the plastic sheet on a rainy day or night, he would certainly have reproduced the scene: twenty-five people, short and tall, on their feet, each holding a tin can to collect the water that dripped off the roof, sometimes in torrents, sometimes drop by drop. If a musician had been there, he would have heard the orchestration of all that water striking the sides of the tins. If a filmmaker had been there, he would have captured the beauty of the silent and spontaneous complicity between wretched people. But there was only us, standing on a floor that was slowly sinking into the clay. After three months it tilted so severely to one side that we all had to find new positions so sleeping women and children wouldn't slip onto the plump bellies of their neighbours.

In spite of all those nights when our dreams spilled onto the sloping floor, my mother still had high hopes for our future. She'd found an accomplice. He was young and certainly naive because he dared to flaunt joy and light-heartedness in the midst of our dull and empty daily lives. Together, he and my mother started an English cla.s.s. We spent whole mornings with him, repeating words we didn't understand. But we all showed up because he was able to raise the sky and give us a glimpse of a new horizon, far from the gaping holes filled with the excrement of the camp's two thousand people. Without his face, we could never have imagined a horizon without flies, worms and nauseating smells. Without his face, we couldn't have imagined that someday we would no longer eat rotting fish flung down late every afternoon when rations were handed out. Without his face, we would certainly have lost the desire to reach out our hands and catch our dreams.

Unfortunately, from all the mornings with this impromptu English teacher, I remembered only one sentence: My boat number is KG0338. It turned out to be totally useless because I never had a chance to say it, not even during the medical examination by the Canadian delegation. The doctor on call didn't speak a word to me. He tugged the elastic of my pants to confirm my s.e.x instead of asking, Boy or girl? I also knew those two words. The appearance of a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl must have been much the same, because of our scrawniness. And time was short: there were so many of us on the other side of the door. It was terribly hot in the small examining room with its windows open onto a noisy alley where hundreds of water buckets collided at the pump. We were covered with scabies and lice and we all looked lost, beyond our depth.

In any case, I spoke very little, sometimes not at all. Throughout my early childhood, my cousin Sao Mai always spoke on my behalf because I was her shadow: the same age, the same cla.s.s, the same s.e.x, but her face was on the bright side and mine on the side of darkness, shadow, silence.

My mother wanted me to talk, to learn French as fast as possible, English too, because my mother tongue had become not exactly insufficient, but useless. Starting in my second year in Quebec, she sent me to a military garrison of anglophone cadets. It was a way that I could learn English for free, she told me. But she was wrong, it wasn't free. I paid for it, dearly. There were around forty cadets, all of them tall, bursting with energy and, above all, teenagers. They took themselves seriously when inspecting in minute detail the fold of a collar, the angle of a beret, the s.h.i.+ne of a boot. The oldest ones yelled at the youngest. They played at war, at the absurd, without understanding. And I didn't understand them. Nor did I understand why the name of the cadet next to me was repeated in a loop by our superior. Maybe he wanted me to remember the name of that teenage boy who was twice my height. My first conversation in English started with me saying to him at the end of the session: "Bye, a.s.shole."

My mother often put me in situations of extreme shame. Once, she asked me to go and buy sugar at the grocery store just below our first apartment. I went but found no sugar. My mother sent me back and even locked the door behind me: "Don't come back without the sugar!" She had forgotten that I was a deaf-mute. I sat on the grocery store steps until it closed, until the grocer took me by the hand and led me to the bag of sugar. He had understood, even if to me the word sugar was bitter.

For a long time, I thought my mother enjoyed constantly pus.h.i.+ng me right to the edge. When I had my own children, I finally understood that I should have seen her behind the locked door, eyes pressed against the peephole; I should have heard her talking on the phone to the grocer when I was sitting on the steps in tears. I also understood later that my mother certainly had dreams for me, but above all she'd given me tools so that I could put down roots, so that I could dream.

The town of Granby was the warm belly that sheltered us during our first year in Canada. The locals cosseted us one by one. The pupils in my grade school lined up to invite us home for lunch so that each of our noon hours was reserved by a family. And every time, we went back to school with nearly empty stomachs because we didn't know how to use a fork to eat rice that wasn't sticky. We didn't know how to tell them that this food was strange to us, that they really didn't have to go to every grocery store in search of the last box of Minute Rice. We could neither talk to nor understand them. But that wasn't the main thing. There was generosity and grat.i.tude in every grain of the rice left on our plates. To this day I still wonder whether words might have tainted those moments of grace. And whether feelings are sometimes understood better in silence, like the one that existed between Claudette and Monsieur Kiet. Their first moments together were wordless, yet Monsieur Kiet agreed to put his baby into Claudette's arms without questioning: a baby, his baby, whom he'd found on the sh.o.r.e after his boat had capsized in an especially greedy wave. He had not found his wife, only his son, who was experiencing a second birth without his mother. Claudette stretched out her arms to them and kept them with her for days, for months, for years.

Johanne held out her hand to me in the same way. She liked me even though I wore a tuque with a McDonald's logo, even though I travelled hidden in a cube van with fifty other Vietnamese to work in fields around the Eastern Towns.h.i.+ps after school. Johanne wanted me to go to a private secondary school with her the following year. Yet she knew that I waited every afternoon in the yard of that very school for the farmers' trucks that would take us to work illegally in the fields, earning a few dollars in exchange for the sacks of beans we picked.

Johanne also took me to the movies, even though I was wearing a s.h.i.+rt bought on sale for eighty-eight cents, with a hole near one of the seams. After the film Fame she taught me how to sing the theme song in English, "I sing the body electric," although I didn't understand the words, or her conversations with her sister and her parents around their fireplace. It was Johanne too who picked me up after my first falls when we went ice skating, who applauded and shouted my name in the crowd when Serge, a cla.s.smate three times my size, took me in his arms along with the football and scored a touchdown.

I wonder if I haven't invented her, that friend of mine. I've met many people who believe in G.o.d, but what I believe in is angels, and Johanne was an angel. She was one of an army of them who'd been parachuted into town to give us shock treatment. By the dozen they showed up at our doors to give us warm clothes, toys, invitations, dreams. I often felt there wasn't enough s.p.a.ce inside us to receive everything we were offered, to catch all the smiles that came our way. How could we visit the Granby zoo more than twice each weekend? How could we appreciate a camping trip to the countryside? How to savour an omelette with maple syrup?

I have a photo of my father being embraced by our sponsors, a family of volunteers to whom we'd been a.s.signed. They spent their Sundays taking us to flea markets. They negotiated fiercely on our behalf so we could buy mattresses, dishes, beds, sofas-in short, the basics-with our three-hundred-dollar government allowance meant to furnish our first home in Quebec. One of the vendors threw in a red cowl-necked sweater for my father. He wore it proudly every day of our first spring in Quebec. Today, his broad smile in the photo from that time manages to make us forget that it was a woman's sweater, nipped in at the waist. Sometimes it's best not to know everything.

Of course, there were times when we'd have liked to know more. To know, for instance, that in our old mattresses there were fleas. But those details don't matter because they don't show in the pictures. In any case, we thought we were immunized against stings, that no flea could pierce our skin bronzed by the Malaysian sun. In fact, the cold winds and hot baths had purified us, making the bites unbearable and the itches b.l.o.o.d.y.

We threw out the mattresses without telling our sponsors. We didn't want them to be disappointed, because they'd given us their hearts, their time. We appreciated their generosity, but not sufficiently: we did not yet know the cost of time, its fair market value, its tremendous scarcity.

For a whole year, Granby represented heaven on earth. I couldn't imagine a better place in the world, even if we were being eaten alive by flies, just as in the refugee camp. A local botanist took us children to swamps where cattails grew in the thousands, to show us the insects. He didn't know that we'd rubbed shoulders with flies in the refugee camps for months. They clung to the branches of a dead tree near the septic tanks, next to our cabin. They positioned themselves around the branches like the berries of a pepper plant or currants. They were so numerous, so enormous, that they didn't need to fly to be in front of our eyes, in our lives. We didn't need to be silent to hear them. Now our botanist guide whispered to us to listen to their droning, to try to understand them.

I know the sound of flies by heart. I just have to close my eyes to hear them buzzing around me again, because for months I had to crouch down above a gigantic pit filled to the brim with excrement, in the blazing sun of Malaysia. I had to look at the indescribable brown colour without blinking so that I wouldn't slip on the two planks behind the door of one of the sixteen cabins every time I set foot there. I had to keep my balance, avoid fainting when my stools or those from the next cabin splattered. At those moments I escaped by listening to the humming of flies. Once, I lost my slipper between the planks after I'd moved my foot too quickly. It fell into the cesspit without sinking, floating there like a boat cast adrift.

I went barefoot for days, waiting for my mother to find an orphan slipper belonging to another child who'd also lost one. I walked directly on the clay soil where maggots had been crawling a week before. With every heavy rainfall they emerged from the cesspit in the hundreds of thousands, as if summoned by a messiah. They all headed for the side of our hill and climbed without ever tiring, without ever falling. They crawled up to our feet, all to the same rhythm, transforming the red clay soil into an undulating white carpet. There were so many that we gave up before we'd even started to fight. They became invincible, we became vulnerable. We let them extend their territory until the rains stopped, when they became vulnerable in turn.

When the Communists entered Saigon, my family handed over half of our property because we'd become vulnerable. A brick wall was erected to establish two addresses: one for us and one for the local police station.

A year later, the authorities from the new Communist administration arrived to clean out our half of the house, to clean us out. Inspectors came to our courtyard with no warning, no authorization, no reason. They asked all those present to gather in the living room. My parents were out, so the inspectors waited for them, sitting on the edges of art deco chairs, their backs straight, without once touching the two white linen squares covered with fine embroidery that adorned the armrests. My mother was the first to appear behind the wrought iron gla.s.s door. She had on her white pleated miniskirt and her running shoes. Behind her, my father was dragging tennis rackets, his face still covered in sweat. The inspectors' surprise visit had thrown us into the present while we were still savouring the last moments of the past. All the adults in the household were ordered to stay in the living room while the inspectors started making their inventory.

We children could follow them from floor to floor, from room to room. They sealed chests of drawers, wardrobes, dressing tables, safes. They even sealed the big chests of drawers filled with the bra.s.sieres of my grandmother and her six daughters, without describing the contents. It seemed to me then that the young inspector was embarra.s.sed at the thought of all those round-breasted girls in the living room, dressed in fine lace imported from Paris. I also thought that he was leaving the paper blank, with no description of the wardrobe's contents, because he was too overwhelmed by desire to write without trembling. But I was wrong: he had no idea what bra.s.sieres were for. In his opinion they looked like his mother's coffee filters, made of cloth sewn around a metal ring, the twisted end of which served as a handle.

At the foot of the Long Bien Bridge that crosses the Red River in Hanoi, every night his mother would fill her coffee filter then dip it into her aluminum coffee pot to make a few cups that she'd sell to pa.s.sersby. In the winter, she placed gla.s.ses containing barely three sips into a bowl filled with hot water to keep them warm during conversations between the men sitting on benches raised just a bit above the ground. Her customers spotted her by the flame of her tiny oil lamp sitting on the tiny work table, next to three cigarettes displayed on a plate. Every morning, the young inspector, still a child, woke up with the oft-mended brown cloth coffee filter, sometimes still wet and hanging from a nail above his head. I heard him talking with the other inspectors in a corner of the staircase. He didn't understand why my family had so many coffee filters filed away in drawers lined with tissue paper. And why were they double? Was it because we always drink coffee with a friend?

The young inspector had been marching in the jungle since the age of twelve to free South Vietnam from the "hairy hands" of the Americans. He had slept in underground tunnels, spent days at a time in a pond, under a water lily, seen the bodies of comrades sacrificed to prevent cannons from sliding, lived through nights of malaria amidst the sound of helicopters and explosions. Aside from his mother's teeth lacquered jet black, he had forgotten his parents' faces. How could he have guessed, then, what a bra.s.siere was for? In the jungle, boys and girls had exactly the same possessions: a green helmet, sandals made from strips of worn-out tires, a uniform, and a black and white checked scarf. An inventory of their belongings took three seconds, unlike ours, which lasted for a year. We had to share our s.p.a.ce by taking ten of those girl and boy soldier-inspectors into our home. We gave them one floor of the house. Each of us lived in our own corner, avoiding contact except during the daily searches, when we were obliged to stand face to face with them. They needed to be sure that we had only the essentials, like them.

One day our ten roomers dragged us to their bathroom, accusing us of stealing a fish they'd been given for their evening meal. They pointed to the toilet bowl and explained to us that the fish had been there that morning, hale and hearty. What had become of it?

Thanks to that fish, we were able to establish communication. Later on, my father corrupted them by having them listen to music on the sly. I sat underneath the piano, in the shadows, watching tears roll down their cheeks, where the horrors of History, without hesitation, had carved grooves. After that, we no longer knew if they were enemies or victims, if we loved or hated them, if we feared or pitied them. And they no longer knew if they had freed us from the Americans or, on the contrary, if we had freed them from the jungle of Vietnam.

Very quickly, though, the music that had accorded them a kind of freedom found itself in a fire, on the rooftop terrace of the house. They had received an order to burn the books, songs, films-everything that betrayed the image of those men and women with muscular arms holding aloft their pitchforks, their hammers and their flag, red with a yellow star. Very quickly, they filled the sky with smoke, once more.

What became of those soldiers? Much has changed since the brick wall was put up between us and the Communists. I went back to Vietnam to work with those who had caused the wall to be built, who'd imagined it as a tool to break hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps even millions. There had been reversals, of course, since the tanks first rolled down the street that ran past our house in 1975. Since then, I had even learned the Communist vocabulary of our former a.s.sailants because the Berlin Wall fell, because the Iron Curtain was raised, because I am still too young to be weighed down by the past. Only, there will never be a brick wall in my house. I still don't share the love for brick walls of the people around me. They claim that bricks make a room warm.

The day I started my job in Hanoi, I walked past a tiny room that opened onto the street. Inside, a man and a woman were arranging bricks into a low wall that divided the room in two. The wall got higher day by day, until it reached the ceiling. My secretary told me that it was because of two brothers who didn't want to live under the same roof. The mother had been helpless against this separation, perhaps because she herself had erected similar walls some thirty years earlier between victors and vanquished. She died during my three-year stay in Hanoi. By way of legacy, to the older child she left the fan without a switch, to the younger the switch without the fan.

It's true that the brick wall between those two brothers can't be compared to the one that existed between my family and the Communist soldiers, nor do these two walls carry the same history as do old Quebecois houses-each wall has its own story. It is thanks to that distance that I've been able to share meals with people who were the right arm and the left arm of Ho Chi Minh without seeing the rancour hovering, without seeing women on a train holding old Guigoz powdered milk cans in their hands as if they were jars of magic potion. For the men shut away in re-education camps, it was a magic potion, even if the cans held only browned meat (tht cha bong): a kilo of roasted pork shredded fibre by fibre, dried all night over the embers, salted, then salted again with nc mm obtained after two days of waiting in line, two days of hope and despair. The women lavished devotion on those filaments of pork, even if they weren't sure of finding their children's father in the camp they were setting off to visit, not knowing if he was dead or alive, wounded or sick. In memory of those women, I cook that browned meat for my sons now and then, to preserve, to repeat, those gestures of love.

Love, as my son Pascal knows it, is defined by the number of hearts drawn on a card or by how many stories about dragons are told by flashlight under a down-filled comforter. I have to wait a few more years till I can report to him that in other times, other places, parents showed their love by willingly abandoning their children, like the parents of Tom Thumb. Similarly, the mother who made me glide on the water with the help of her long stick, surrounded by the high mountain peaks of Hoa L, wanted to give up her daughter, pa.s.s her to me. That mother wanted me to replace her. She preferred to cry over her child's absence rather than watch her running after tourists to sell them the tablecloths she had embroidered. I was a young girl then. In the midst of those rocky mountains, I saw only a majestic landscape in place of that mother's infinite love. There are nights when I run along the long strips of earth next to the buffalo to call her back, to take her daughter's hand in mine.

I am waiting till Pascal is a few years older before I make the connection between the story of the mother from Hoa L and Tom Thumb. In the meantime, I tell him the story of the pig that travelled in a coffin to get through the surveillance posts between the countryside and the towns. He likes to hear me imitate the crying women in the funeral procession who threw themselves body and soul onto the long wooden box, wailing, while the farmers, dressed all in white with bands around their heads, tried to hold them back, to console them in front of the inspectors who were too accustomed to death. Once they got back to town, behind the closed doors of an ever-changing secret address, the farmers turned the pig over to the butcher, who cut it into pieces. The merchants would then tie those around their legs and waists to transport them to the black market, to families, to us.

I tell Pascal these stories to keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school.

I remember some students in my high school who complained about the compulsory history cla.s.ses. Young as we were, we didn't realize that the course was a privilege only countries at peace can afford. Elsewhere, people are too preoccupied by their day-to-day survival to take the time to write their collective history. If I hadn't lived in the majestic silence of great frozen lakes, in the humdrum everyday life of peace, where love is celebrated with balloons, confetti, chocolates, I would probably never have noticed the old woman who lived near my great-grandfather's grave in the Mekong Delta. She was very old, so old that the sweat ran down her wrinkles like a brook that traces a furrow in the earth. Her back was hunched, so hunched that she had to go down staircases backwards so as not to lose her balance and fall headfirst. How many grains of rice had she planted? How long had she spent with her feet in the mud? How many suns had she watched set over her rice fields? How many dreams had she set aside only to find herself bent in two, thirty years, forty years later?

We often forget about the existence of all those women who carried Vietnam on their backs while their husbands and sons carried weapons on theirs. We forget them because under their cone-shaped hats they did not look up at the sky. They waited only for the sun to set on them so they could faint instead of falling asleep. Had they taken the time to let sleep come, they would have imagined their sons blown into a thousand pieces or the bodies of their husbands drifting along a river like flotsam. American slaves were able to sing about their sorrow in the cotton fields. Those women let their sadness grow in the chambers of their hearts. They were so weighed down by all their grief that they couldn't pull themselves up, couldn't straighten their hunched backs, bowed under the weight of their sorrow. When the men emerged from the jungle and started to walk again along the earthen dikes around their rice fields, the women continued to bear the weight of Vietnam's inaudible history on their backs. Very often they pa.s.sed away under that weight, in silence.

One of those women, whom I knew, died when she lost her footing in the toilet, perched above a pond full of bullheads. Her plastic slippers slid. Anyone watching her at that moment would have seen her cone-shaped hat disappear behind the four panels that barely hid her crouching body, surrounding her without protecting her. She died in the family's septic tank, her head plunging into a hole full of excrement between two planks, behind her hut, surrounded by smooth-skinned, yellow-fleshed bullheads, without scales, without memory.

After the old lady died, I would go every Sunday to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop tea leaves into open lotus blossoms. They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers.

Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees. Those branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays.

My parents often remind my brothers and me that they won't have any money for us to inherit, but I think they've already pa.s.sed on to us the wealth of their memories, allowing us to grasp the beauty of a flowering wisteria, the delicacy of a word, the power of wonder. Even more, they've given us feet for walking to our dreams, to infinity. Which may be enough baggage to continue our journey on our own. Otherwise, we would pointlessly clutter our path with possessions to transport, to insure, to take care of.

A Vietnamese saying has it that "Only those with long hair are afraid, for no one can pull the hair of those who have none." And so I try as much as possible to acquire only those things that don't extend beyond the limits of my body.

In any case, since our escape by boat, we learned how to travel very light. The gentleman seated next to my uncle in the hold had no luggage, not even a small bag with warm clothes like us. He had on everything he owned. Swimming trunks, shorts, pants, T-s.h.i.+rt, s.h.i.+rt and sweater, and the rest was in his orifices: diamonds embedded in his molars, gold on his teeth and American dollars stuffed in his a.n.u.s. Once we were at sea, we saw women open their sanitary napkins to take out the American dollars impeccably folded lengthwise in three.

As for me, I had an acrylic bracelet, pink like the gums of the dental plate it had been made from, filled with diamonds. My parents had also put diamonds in the collars of my brothers' s.h.i.+rts. But we had no gold in our teeth because it was forbidden to touch the teeth of my mother's children. She often told us that teeth and hair are the roots, maybe even the fundamental source, of a person. My mother wanted our teeth to be perfect.

That's why even in a refugee camp she was able to find a pair of dental pliers to pull out our loose baby teeth. She waved each extracted tooth in front of us under the blazing Malaysian sun. Those blood-stained teeth were proudly displayed against the backdrop of a fine sandy beach and a barbed-wire fence. My mother told me it would be possible to enlarge my eyes and maybe even to fix my ears, which stuck out too much. She couldn't fix the other structural imperfections of my face, though, so at least I should have flawless teeth and above all not trade them for diamonds. She also knew that if our boat had been intercepted by Thai pirates, the gold teeth and those that were filled with diamonds would have been pulled out.

The police were ordered to allow all boats carrying Vietnamese of Chinese background to leave "in secret." The Chinese were capitalists, hence anti-Communist, because of their ethnic background and their accent. But the inspectors were allowed to search them, to strip them of everything they owned till the very last minute, to the point of humiliation. My family and I became Chinese. We called on the genes of my ancestors so that we could leave with the tacit consent of the police.

My maternal great-grandfather was Chinese. He arrived in Vietnam by chance at the age of eighteen, married a Vietnamese woman and had eight children. Four of them chose to be Vietnamese, the other four Chinese. The four Vietnamese, including my grandfather, became politicians and scientists. The four Chinese prospered in the rice business. Even though my grandfather became a prefect, he could not persuade his four Chinese siblings to send their children to a Vietnamese school. And the Vietnamese clan didn't speak a word of Szechuanese. The family was divided in two, as was the country: in the South, pro-American, in the North, Communist.

My uncle Chung, my mother's big brother, was the bridge between the two political camps. In fact, his name means together, but I call him Uncle Two because it is a South Vietnamese tradition to replace the names of brothers and sisters with their birth order, beginning with the number two.

Uncle Two, the eldest son in the family, was a member of parliament and leader of the opposition. He belonged to a political party made up of young intellectuals who situated themselves in a third camp, daring to stand between the two lines of fire. The pro-American government had permitted the birth of that party to appease the anger and turmoil of the young idealists. My uncle had achieved top billing in the mind of the public. On one hand, his political program appealed to the members of his team. On the other, thanks to his movie-star good looks, to his const.i.tuents he represented the hope for a semblance of democracy. A charismatic, happy-go-lucky young man, he had taken down the frontier between the Chinese and Vietnamese families. He was someone who could discuss with a cabinet minister the impact of a paper shortage on freedom of the press while at the same time wrapping his arm around the waist of the man's wife and leading her in a waltz-even though the Vietnamese didn't waltz.

All through my childhood, I had a secret wish: to be Uncle Two's daughter. Sao Mai was his princess, even if he sometimes forgot her existence for days at a time. Sao Mai was revered by her parents like a prima donna. Uncle Two had many parties at their house. And often, in the middle of the evening, he would stop all conversation to seat his daughter on the piano bench and introduce the little melody she was going to play. For him, during the two short minutes of "Au clair de la lune," nothing existed but the chubby-fingered doll tinkling away with the greatest of ease before an audience of adults. Every time, I sat under the staircase to memorize my uncle's kiss on Sao Mai's nose while his guests applauded. He gave her only two minutes of attention now and then, but it was enough to give my cousin an inner strength that I lacked. It didn't matter if her stomach was empty or full, Sao Mai never hesitated to boss around her big brothers and me.

My cousin Sao Mai and I were brought up together. Either I was at her house or she was at mine. Sometimes at her place there wasn't even a grain of rice. When her parents were away, the maids disappeared too-often with the jar of rice. And her parents were often away. One day her big brother fed us some stale rice stuck to the bottom of a pan. He'd added a little oil and some green onion to make it into a meal. Five of us nibbled on that dried-up cake of rice. Other days we were buried under mountains of mangoes, longans, lychees, Lyon sausage, cream puffs.

My cousin's parents would base their choice of what to buy on the colour of a fruit or the perfume of a spice or simply according to the whim of the moment. The food they brought home was always surrounded by a festive aura, a sense of decadence and thrill. They didn't fret over the empty rice jar in the kitchen or the poems we were supposed to learn by heart. They just wanted us to stuff ourselves on mangoes, to bite into fruit and make the juice spurt, while spinning around and around like tops to the music of the Doors, Sylvie Vartan, Michel Sardou, the Beatles or Cat Stevens.

At my house, meals were always on time, the maids in attendance, homework supervised. Unlike Sao Mai's parents, my mother gave us only two mangoes to be shared by my two brothers and me, despite the dozens more that stayed in the basket. If we didn't agree about the portions, she took them back and deprived us of them until we'd reached a compromise to divide up the two mangoes among the three of us. Which is why I sometimes preferred to eat dry rice with my cousins.

I wanted to be very different from my mother, until the day I decided to have my two sons share a bedroom, even though there were empty rooms in the house. I wanted them to learn to stand by one another the way my brothers and I had done. Someone told me that bonds are forged with laughter but even more with sharing and the frustrations of sharing. It may be that the tears of one led to the tears of the other in the middle of the night, because my autistic son finally became aware of the presence of Pascal, a big brother he'd ignored during his first three or four years. Today, he takes palpable pleasure from curling up in Pascal's arms, hiding behind him in front of strangers. It may be that thanks to all that interrupted sleep, Pascal willingly puts on his left shoe before the right to accommodate his brother's obsessive rigidity. So that his brother can begin his day without irritation, without undue disruption.

My mother was probably right, then, not only to force me to share with my brothers but also to make us share with our cousins. I shared my mother with my cousin Sao Mai because she'd taken responsibility for her niece's education. We went to the same school, like twins, sitting on the same bench in the same cla.s.s. Sometimes my cousin would replace our teacher when she was away, standing on her desk and brandis.h.i.+ng a big ruler. She was five or six years old like the rest of us, but not in the least intimidated by the ruler since, unlike us, she had always been placed on a pedestal. I, on the other hand, would wet my pants because I didn't dare put my hand up, because I didn't dare walk to the door with all eyes focused on me. My cousin struck down anyone who copied my answers. She glared at anyone who made fun of my tears. She protected me because I was her shadow.

She dragged her shadow with her everywhere, but sometimes she made me run behind her like a dog, just for laughs.

When I was with Sao Mai-and I was always with Sao Mai-the waiters in what used to be the Cercle sportif de Saigon never offered me a lime soda after my tennis lessons because they'd already brought one to Sao Mai. Inside the big fences of this fas.h.i.+onable club were two very distinct categories of people: the elite and the servants, the infant kings in their immaculate white clothes and the barefoot youngsters who picked up the b.a.l.l.s. I belonged to neither. I was just Sao Mai's shadow. I positioned myself behind her to eavesdrop on her father's conversations with his tennis partners at tea time. He talked about Proust while he ate madeleines, settled in his rattan armchair on the terrace of the Cercle sportif. We travelled with him through his memories of being a foreign student in Paris. He was as enthusiastic in his descriptions of the chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg as he was about the cancan dancers' legs that went on forever. I listened to him from behind his chair, holding my breath, like a shadow, so that he wouldn't stop.

My mother often got mad at me for being too self-effacing. She told me I had to step out of the shadows, work on my outstanding features so that the light could be reflected there. Every time she tried to take me out of the shadows, out of my shadow, I drowned myself in tears to the point of exhaustion, until she left me behind on the back seat of the car, asleep in the scorching heat of Saigon. I spent more time in people's driveways than in their sitting rooms. Sometimes I woke up to the sound of children innocently whirling around the car, sticking out their tongues and snickering. My mother thought that defending myself would strengthen my muscles. In time she was able to turn me into a woman, but never into a princess.

Today, my mother regrets not bringing me up to be a princess, because she's not my queen in the way that Uncle Two was a king to his children. He maintained the royal status until his death, even though he never signed a note for the teacher, read a report card or washed his children's dirty hands. Sometimes my cousin and I were lucky enough to travel on my uncle's Vespa, my cousin standing in front, me sitting behind. Sao Mai and I waited for him many times under the tamarind tree in front of our primary school, until the janitor padlocked the doors behind us. Even the men who sold pickled mangoes, guavas with spicy salt and chilled jicama had already left the sidewalk in front of the school when Mai and I, dazzled by the setting sun, would see him coming in the distance, hair windblown, wearing a fiery smile, incomparable.

He would take us in his arms and all at once not only were we transformed into princesses, but we were in his eyes also the prettiest, the most highly prized. That moment of euphoria only lasted the length of the journey: very soon he would have a woman in his arms, rarely the same one, who became in turn his princess of the moment. We would wait for him in the sitting room until the new princess stopped being a princess. Each of those women had the satisfaction of thinking she was the chosen one, even if she was well aware that she was only one among many.

My parents were very critical of Uncle Two's casual att.i.tude. That was why, without Uncle Two ever asking me, I never talked about the long waits outside school or the evenings in the sitting rooms of unknown women. If I'd exposed him, he wouldn't have been allowed to pick us up. I would have lost the chance of being a princess, of seeing my kiss transformed into a flower on his cheek. Thirty years later, my mother would like me to place upon her cheeks those same kisses turned into flowers. Maybe I did become a princess in her eyes. But I'm just her daughter, only her daughter.

From Quebec, my mother sent money to Uncle Two's sons so they could get away by boat as we had done. After the first wave of boat people in the late 1970s, it no longer made sense to send girls to sea because encounters with pirates had become inevitable, a ritual of the journey, an inescapable injury. So only the two older boys set out on the fugitives' bus. They were arrested during the journey. Their father, my uncle, my king, had denounced them ... Was it from fear they'd be lost at sea or from fear of reprisals against him, their father? When I think back on it, I remind myself that he couldn't tell them he'd never been their father, only their king. He must have feared being pointed to publicly as an anti-Communist. He was certainly afraid of appearing in public, where he'd have been at home a short time before. If I'd had a voice then, I'd have told him not to denounce them. I'd have told him that I never informed on him for being late or made mention of his escapades.

Jeanne, our good fairy with a T-s.h.i.+rt and pink tights and a flower in her hair, liberated my voice without using words. She spoke to us-her nine Vietnamese students at the Sainte-Famille elementary school-with music, with her fingers, her shoulders. She showed us how to occupy the s.p.a.ce around us by freeing our arms, by raising our chins, by breathing deeply. She fluttered around us like a fairy, her eyes stroking us one by one. Her neck stretched out to form a continuous line with her shoulder, her arm, all the way to her fingertips. Her legs made great circular movements as if to sweep the walls, to stir the air. It was thanks to Jeanne that I learned how to free my voice from the folds of my body so it could reach my lips.

I used my voice to read to Uncle Two just before he died, in the very heart of Saigon, some of the erotic pa.s.sages from Houellebecq's Particules elementaires. I no longer wanted to be his princess, I'd become his angel, reminding him how he had dipped my fingers into the whipped cream on cafe viennois while singing Besame, besame mucho ...

His body, even once it was cold, even once it was rigid, was surrounded not only by his children, by his wives-the old one and the new-by his brothers and sisters, but also by people who didn't know him. They came in the thousands to mourn his death. Some were losing their lover, some their sports reporter, others their former member of parliament, their writer, their painter, their hand at poker.

Among all these people was a gentleman who was obviously dest.i.tute. He wore a s.h.i.+rt with a yellowed collar and wrinkled black pants held up by an old belt. He stood in the distance, in the shade of a royal poinciana laden with flame-red blossoms, next to a mud-stained Chinese bicycle. He had waited for hours to follow the funeral procession to the graveyard, which was in the outskirts of the city, enclosed within a Buddhist temple. There again he stood off to one side, silent and unmoving. One of my aunts went over and asked him why he'd pedalled all that distance. Did he know my uncle? He replied that he didn't know him but that it was thanks to my uncle's words that he was alive, that he got up every morning. He had lost his idol. I hadn't. I'd lost neither my idol nor my king, only a friend who told me his stories about women, about politics, painting, books; and mostly about frivolity, because he hadn't grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man.

So perhaps my mother doesn't need to be my queen; simply being my mother is already a lot, even if the rare kisses I place on her cheeks aren't so majestic.

My mother envied my uncle's irresponsibility, or rather his capacity for it. In spite of herself, she was also jealous of her little brother and sisters' status as king and queens. Like their older brother, her sisters are idolized by their children for a variety of reasons, one because she's the most beautiful, another the most talented, yet another the smartest ... In my cousins' eyes, their mother is always the best. For all of us, including my aunts and cousins, my mother was only frightening. When she was a young woman, she'd represented the highest authority figure. Zealously she imposed her role of older sister on her little sisters, because she wanted to break away from her big brother, who gobbled up every presence around him.

So my mother had taken on the duties of man of the house, Minister of Education, Mother Superior, chief executive of the clan. She made decisions, handed out punishments, put right delinquents, silenced protesters ... My grandfather, as chairman of the board, didn't look after everyday tasks. My grandmother had her hands full raising her young children and recovering from repeated miscarriages. According to my mother, Uncle Two was the embodiment of selfishness and egocentricity. And so she became established as manager of the supreme authority. I remember one day when my grandmother didn't even dare ask her to unlock the bathroom door and release her little brother and sisters who were being punished for going out with Uncle Two without my mother's permission. As she was only a young girl, she administered her authority-naively-with an iron hand. Her revenge against her older brother's nonchalance and the way the children revered him was poorly planned, because the youngsters went on playing in the bathroom, and did it without her. All the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance.

Over the past ten years, however, my mother has discovered the joys of dancing. She let her friends persuade her that the tango, the cha-cha and the paso doble could replace physical exercise, that there was nothing sensual or seductive or intoxicating about them. Yet ever since she's been going to her weekly dancing cla.s.s, she says now and then that she wishes she'd segued from her days on the election campaign to the parties where her brother, my father and dozens of other young candidates amused themselves around a table. Also, today she seeks my father's hand at a movie and his kiss on her cheek when posing for photos.

My mother started to live, to let herself be carried away, to reinvent herself at the age of fifty-five.

As for my father, he didn't have to reinvent himself. He is someone who lives in the moment, with no affection for the past. He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements. That's why he always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness, whether holding a mop on the steps of a hotel or sitting in a limousine en route to a strategic meeting with his minister.

From my father I inherited the permanent feeling of satisfaction. Where did he find it, though? Was it because he was the tenth child? Or because of the long wait for his kidnapped father's release? Before the French left Vietnam, before the Americans arrived, the Vietnamese countryside was terrorized by different factions of thugs introduced there by the French authorities to divide the country. It was common practice to sell wealthy families a nail to pay the ransom of someone who'd been kidnapped. If the nail wasn't bought, it was hammered into an earlobe-or elsewhere-on the kidnap victim. My grandfather's nail was bought by his family. When he came home, he sent his children to urban centres to live with cousins, thereby ensuring their safety and their access to education. Very early, my father learned how to live far away from his parents, to leave places, to love the present tense, to let go of any attachment to the past.

That is why he's never been curious to know his real date of birth. The official date recorded on his birth certificate at the city hall corresponds to a day with no bombardment, no exploding mines, no hostages taken. Parents may have thought that their children's existence began on the first day that life went back to normal, not at the moment of their first breath.

Similarly, he has never felt the need to see Vietnam again after his departure. Today, people from his birthplace visit him on behalf of property developers, suggesting he demand the deed to his father's house. They say that ten families live there now. The last time we saw it, it was being used as a barracks by Communist soldiers recycled as firemen. Those soldiers started their families in the big house. Do they know that they live in a building put up by a French engineer, a graduate of the prestigious National School of Bridges and Roads? Do they know that the house is a thank-you from my great-uncle to my grandfather, his older brother, who sent him to France for his education? Do they know that ten children were brought up there but now live in ten different cities because they were ejected from their family circle? No, they know nothing. They can't know: they were born after the French withdrawal and before that part of the history of Vietnam could be taught to them. They'd probably never seen an American face up close, without camouflage, until the first tourists came to their town some years ago. They only know that if my father takes back the house and sells it to a developer, they will receive a small fortune, a reward for confining my paternal grandparents to the tiniest room in their own house during the final months of their lives.