Aperture on the East (13 page)

“
Sounds like a good
match,” said Ana, looking away.

Vo stopped walking and said, “Are you
hungry?”

“
A little,” said Ana. It
was dark now, and Ana had been walking for quite some time. She was
more than a little hungry.

“
My motorcycle is right
here.” Vo pointed to the curb of the promenade where a row of
motorcycles were parked. “Have you been to Lac Canh?”

Ana shook her head.

“
Then, you are missing out
on a local tradition,” said Vo. “Let’s rectify it.”

Ana donned the helmet and hopped on
the backseat of the motorcycle with both legs dangling to one
side.

“
You’d better hold on to
me. I don’t want you to fall off,” said Vo.

After some deliberation, Ana had no
choice but to put her arms around Vo’s waist. Vo took off and they
fell into the bustle of the city traffic. Ana could feel the heat
emanating from Vo’s body, and smell the slight saltiness in his
shirt. Although she felt a little nervous, and her heart was
pounding like it did every time she was around Vo, she was somehow
at ease. It seemed natural to be riding on Vo’s motorcycle, her
face taking in the cool air from the sea.

They were seated on a table next to
the sidewalk when they got to the restaurant Lac Canh. The waiter
set down a clay stove filled with burning coal in front of them. Vo
ordered a plate with slices of raw beef, chicken, squid and whole
shrimp in shells, and promptly grilled them on the stove over a
wire mesh. The sizzling smoke with the aroma of the marinade rose
in front of Ana and made both her eyes and mouth water. The
restaurant was packed with locals as well as a few tourists.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying the food and all engaged in excited
chatters.

Ana started eating eagerly as soon as
Vo took the meat off the grill. Ana did not even try to eat like a
lady as convention had dictated.

“
Slow down, Ana,” said Vo.
“You are going to choke. You want something to wash it down
with?”

Before Ana could answer, Vo had said
something to the waiter, who quickly brought over two bottles of
chilled Saigon Beer.

Vo set a bottle down in front of Ana
and raised his bottle. “Don’t tell me you don’t drink.”

Ana hesitated for a few seconds, and
thought that she had better turn it down. But she was feeling so
good, so happy, the company was wonderful, and she was
thirsty.

Ana bit her lower lip,
then raised her bottle and tapped it on Vo’s. “Za zdarovje!
As we say in Russia.”

They both took a drink of the cold
beer. Ana was instantly satisfied. The beer was necessary to
enhance, and at the same time balance, the bold flavors of the
barbeque. This was a pleasure she hadn’t experienced for quite a
while, and yet it felt so familiar, so intimate, and so
potent.

“
That was really, really
good,” said Ana, somewhat tipsy, more from the atmosphere and
overall sense of wellbeing than from the sip of beer.

“
Do you want to go out on
the sea with me on your next day off?” said Vo. “I know a great
little island with white sand beach and water as clear as glass. We
can go on my boat.”

“
Sure, why
not?”

Ana felt like she would do anything Vo
asked her to do at this point. She remembered the fiancée, but
decided not to bring that up. She was having a good time, and she
was just going to let it roll.

Lan Nguyen was in her late sixties.
Her black hair with a few streaks of gray was tied up in a bun.
There were a few wrinkles on her face, but no liver spots or
sagging skin to give away her age. She wore a light green linen
pant suit with well-cushioned brown leather sandals. Her suitcase
was tucked away in the trunk of the taxi, and her large shoulder
bag was lying on her lap. She had just been picked up from the Cam
Ranh Airport, and was headed toward Nha Trang. This was the first
time she had ever visited Vietnam since she left nearly four
decades ago.

Lan last saw Nha Trang a few weeks
before Saigon fell in 1975. Her husband was in the South Vietnamese
Navy at the time. When the word came that it was time to leave, Lan
was at home with four children, ages ranging from nine months to
nine years. She had not received any communication from her husband
in a few weeks, and no one knew whether he was dead or alive. She
had to pack up a few valuables and personal items in a hurry, as
there was barely any time to prepare for the evacuation. The North
Vietnamese forces were sweeping south at an astonishing speed. Lan
wasn’t hopeful that she and her children would be able to evacuate,
as there were so many people in the same situation who were trying
to leave, and some of those had more influence in terms of money or
power to get in the front of the line. She had to try anyway. She
couldn’t just wait and see what was going to happen when the new
government took hold. Her husband had inherited a piece of farm
land just north of Nha Trang. She was helping to manage it while
her husband was away, overseeing two farm hands that produced
enough rice and vegetables to allow for a relatively comfortable
living for the family. Furthermore, they were Catholics. She had
heard about the persecution, and even execution, of landowners and
Catholics up north, and she wasn’t going to be a sitting
duck.

The two older children walked on their
own, each carrying a small sack of food and water for the family.
Lan tied the then nine-month-old to her back using a large piece of
cloth, and held the three-year-old in her arms with a large, heavy
bag hanging from one shoulder. They tried to walk as fast as they
could to the air base, but they ended up almost running as
thousands of other countrymen were also heading in the same
direction, rushing to get on the planes. Cars and motorcycles
clogged the streets, and at times it was impossible to move
forward. Surprisingly, the children did not fuss under such
stressful atmosphere. They made it to the air base just as the last
helicopter took to the air. Lan, along with a mass of other
civilians, waited until it was clear that no aircraft was returning
that day. The horde started to move south, and Lan commanded her
children to follow.

The port of Nha Trang was a sight to
behold. All the American civilians had long been ferried off to the
aircraft carriers about twenty miles off the coast. A dozen
American soldiers, carrying semi-automatic rifles, remained on land
in an attempt to guide the Vietnamese evacuees on to the last two
U.S. Navy ships with some kind of order, but people were climbing
aboard in all sorts of manners out of desperation. Others took to
the local fishing boats and cargo ships, which were all overloaded
with refugees already. Lan and her children tried to push their way
out to the front of the crowd, but others pushed them back. Lan was
sweating from carrying two toddlers and the heavy bag, and her
heart was pounding in anxiety. She looked around, trying to find a
way to get onto any of the vessels.

“
Lan! Lan!”

Someone was shouting her name, and she
looked toward the source of the sound, peering over the heads of
what seemed like a million people. She saw someone waving at her,
someone who was about to step on the gangway to one of the U.S.
Navy ships. It was Dr. Dat Nguyen, a medical doctor who lived on
her street, and who had treated her family for many
years.

She saw Dr. Nguyen talk to an American
soldier, cupping his hands to filter out the noise. Then, the
American soldier came and gestured for her and her children to
follow him. The other refugees wanted to go along, but the soldier
pushed them back with his rifle. When they got to the gangway, Dr.
Nguyen told them to get on board. Lan did not stop to question, and
she quickly herded her children onto the ship.

Dr. Nguyen talked to Lan briefly
before he went off to look for his family members. He had been
given priority to board so that he could care for the large number
of refugees who were bound to have illness during the whole process
of evacuation and resettlement. When he was about to step on the
gangway he had decided to take a last look of his beloved country
while his feet were still on his motherland. He saw Lan, and
immediately decided to try and help her and her children get on
board. He had told the American soldier that she was his sister and
that the children were his nieces and nephew. They had the same
last name, so if the soldier wanted to verify their identification
cards they could still pull it through, given that no official was
going to investigate any further under the circumstances. Whether
the soldier believed Dr. Nguyen’s statement, no one ever knew, and
he did not ask for their identification cards.

Lan saw Dr. Nguyen one last time when
they got off the ship to board a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier headed
for Guam. Lan tried to look for Dr. Nguyen during the week at sea,
but he was apparently too busy taking care of patients to spare
time for anything else. Lan herself was seasick, as she had never
been out at sea for such a long period of time. The stressful
condition on board with limited resources for such a large number
of evacuees did not help. Both babies and their mothers cried, and
men wept quietly. A few people moaned day and night, hurting both
physically and mentally.

The normally idyllic island of Guam
was suddenly overcrowded, and the beaches were polluted with human
waste. Lan and her children stayed in Guam for over a month before
they were selected to go to the United States. They were flown to
the refugee camp at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. There Lan
met other refugees who were Catholics, and made friends with people
from other Vietnamese cities and villages that she had never heard
of. They all spoke Vietnamese, but Lan could hear the regional
differences in their accents and choice of words. Ironically, the
first cultural shock she experienced was not from associating with
Americans, but from reconciling with the various customs and habits
of her own people. Luckily, the war was a great equalizer, and the
national patriotism was much stronger than any regional rivalry
that might have existed.

A friend, Hong Tran, from the village
of Phuc Tinh, southeast of Saigon, told Lan one day that she had
gotten a Catholic family in New Orleans to sponsor her resettlement
there with her husband and three children. Hong wanted to know if
Lan was interested in moving to New Orleans as well, because Hong’s
sponsor was looking to take on a second family. Lan did not
hesitate. She didn’t know where New Orleans was or what it looked
like, but she was ready to leave the refugee camp.

A week later Lan and her children
boarded another airplane with Hong’s family and they flew south to
the city at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Their sponsor
family helped them settle into the Versailles Arms apartment
complex in Village de L’Est. They were welcomed into a local
Catholic church, and many Sunday afternoons were passed with
luncheons where the Vietnamese brought traditional dishes that they
made as well as they could with local ingredients, and the
Americans brought their gumbo and crawfish etouffee. The bond was
formed instantly with the common denominator of the French
connection from a not so distant past.

One night, the doorbell rang, and Lan
hesitated to answer it. She was still not quite sure of the people
around her, even though they were mostly all Vietnamese. She peeped
out of the small hole in the door, and saw a man with a full beard
and a baseball cap on. She couldn’t tell if this was a
neighbor.

“
Lan. Open the door. It’s
your husband, Quan. I am home!” shouted the man outside the
door.

Lan couldn’t believe her ears, but the
voice sounded familiar. She opened the door, and the man picked her
up off the floor and held her tightly in his arms.

“
Lan, Lan.” That was all
he could manage to say. Lan’s sponsor family had located Quan, who
had been evacuated via a completely different route, having gone
through the Philippines and then Camp Pendleton in California. Lan
couldn’t say a word. Their tears were all the conversation that
took place for the rest of that night.

Quan resumed his pre-war
job as a fisherman, and Lan started selling eggrolls,
bánh mì
, and
phở
out of her
apartment. They eventually saved up enough money to open a small
restaurant, and moved out of Versailles Arms into a three-bedroom
house a few blocks away. Their children made friends with people of
different ethnic backgrounds, something they could never
contemplate when they were children themselves, as they had not
known of a bigger world outside of Nha Trang. All of their children
later obtained university degrees and were now secured in
respectable careers. They had been truly free from want. When Lan
went to bed at night, she often compared her new dwelling to her
ancestral home in Nha Trang; both sat in the fertile floodplain of
a vital river. The River Cai and the East Sea had provided for her
ancestors much like how the grand Mississippi River and the Gulf of
Mexico now provided for her family. When she mused over this, she
would smile, thinking that the Virgin Mary had indeed been watching
over her after all.

Lan married off her first three
children, but had a difficult time with her youngest, Vo, who chose
career over the woman that he loved until it was too late. Quan
died of a heart attack a few years ago, and Lan made it a personal
mission to secure Vo’s marriage. She was angry when Colette called
off the wedding, but the anger was more than replaced by a great
sadness when Colette was killed in a car crash. She didn’t let the
sadness occupy her mind for very long, however, before she started
consulting the matchmakers. Vo had escaped to Nha Trang after
Colette’s death, so she broadened the search to Vietnam. An old
friend, Thi Pham, found Lan through the same matchmaking agency
they both used in Nha Trang. Thi had also been looking for a match
for her daughter, Kim. Lan was beyond ecstatic when she got the
letter from Thi. It was destiny, Lan thought, that Vo should return
to the place where he was born and marry the daughter of Lan’s
childhood best friend.