Aperture on the East (2 page)

Presently, instead of being a paying
customer, Ana was being interviewed for a waitress position by the
owner of Quan Bien Dong, in its main kitchen located at the back of
the establishment. Ana could feel the heat coming from the pots of
boiling soup and frying oil on the stoves, and she tried very hard
not to be distracted by the aroma of lemongrass and
coriander.

“
Anastasia Romanova,” said
Ana, when asked to repeat her name. “But I go by Ana.”

“
And you waitressed
before?” Mr. Tran, the owner, said in English with a moderately
heavy Vietnamese accent.

“
I’ve been waitressing all
my life, Mr. Tran,” said Ana. She regretted it as soon as she said
it. A woman in her late thirties should have accomplished something
other than waitressing, she thought.

Mr. Tran narrowed his eyes. “You want
a full-time job, but I am mostly hiring part-time college
students.”

“
Mr. Tran, I’ve worked in
restaurants that had a lot of tourists, and I know what they’re
looking for as soon as they walk in the door. I can handle many
tough situations, like if they don’t like their
food
—
”

Mr. Tran raised an eyebrow, and Ana
said, “Which I’m sure doesn’t happen here at all because your food
is excellent, and I’ve eaten here so many times since I came to Nha
Trang a month ago.”

Sensing that Mr. Tran was still
doubtful, Ana said, “And I can work whenever you need me because I
don’t go to school. I don’t have other obligations.” Besides Ivan
and Zoe that was, but surely they could take care of themselves for
a few hours in the evening.

“
All right,” said Mr.
Tran, “I can use one more Russian waitress anyway, with so many
Russian tourists coming every day. I get lots of customers from
Australia and America, too, and your English sounds
okay.”

Mr. Tran gave Ana a brochure of his
restaurant and said, “Quan Bien Dong means East Sea Restaurant.
East Sea is what we call the South China Sea in Vietnam, in case
anyone wants to know.” Mr. Tran then handed a menu to Ana. “Take
this home and study it. You can start tomorrow. Remember, it is a
trial, and I can let you go any time.”

“
Oh, thank you thank you
so much Mr. Tran. I won’t let you down,” said Ana, almost in tears.
She had been looking for a job for just about as long as she had
been in Nha Trang, and she was running really low in cash. She had
not much left in savings after paying for the expensive move from
Russia.

Mr. Tran went over some details
regarding work hours, wages, and other policies, and Ana thanked
him again before she exited the kitchen. She was so ecstatic that
when she bounded out of the gates of the restaurant, she bumped
into the shoulder of a woman walking in.

“
Oh, I’m so sorry,” said
Ana, instinctively in Russian.

The petite woman smiled and said
something to Ana. Ana could tell that it was Vietnamese but she
didn’t understand it. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders
at the woman.

“
She said, ‘I’m very sorry
for running into you. I hope you’re not hurt,’” said a man in
English. He was standing next to the woman, arm in arm.

“
Oh, no, I am sorry,” said
Ana, in English this time. “I hope you are not hurt. I mean, I hope
she is not hurt.”

The man smiled at Ana, looking
straight into her eyes. He was probably also Vietnamese, tall and
athletic, with thick eyebrows and a square jaw. Ana looked
away.

“
Welcome, welcome. Is
everything okay?” said Mr. Tran. He approached Ana and the
couple.

“
Yes it is,” said another
tall man, black, who appeared from behind the couple. “Let’s get
inside. I’m hungry.” He glanced at Ana, and then tapped on the
backs of the couple. The three of them went inside the
restaurant.

Mr. Tran gave Ana a stern stare and
said, “I hope this is not going to happen again.”

Ana apologized profusely and left the
restaurant.

“
What was I doing?” said
Ana to herself. She waved down a motorcycle taxi, and showed the
driver a map with directions to her apartment. She thought about
the man who had interpreted for the woman that she bumped into.
There was such fieriness in his eyes. 

Ana could hear the heated exchange of
shouting in the staircase before she reached her fourth-floor
apartment. The distinctive voice of Zoe was layered with a more
nasal variety of the locals.

“
I already said I’m sorry,
but I need to practice,” said Zoe, holding her electric guitar.
“Plus, your TV is always so loud. The whole city is noisy, so
what’s the big deal?”

Meanwhile, their neighbor across the
hall, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman with a round face, raged on
with her angry monologue.

Ana stepped in front of Zoe and
managed to say a few words in Vietnamese to apologize. She pushed
Zoe into their apartment and shut the door. Zoe sat down on the
long bench in the living room and promptly resumed playing her
guitar.

Ana stared at the guitar for a moment;
the teardrop-shaped Vox Mark VI with a sunburst finish was the only
legacy Zoe’s father left them. Ana took a deep breath, walked
across the living room to Zoe, removed the guitar’s palm-sized,
plug-and-play amplifier, and walked away.

“
What the hell?” said
Zoe.

“
You need to respect the
people around us. It is dinner time now and everyone’s home, so you
need to be quiet,” said Ana. She was consciously trying not to
raise her voice.

“
Uh, I’m so bored,” said
Zoe. She grabbed the remote control and flipped through the
television channels.

“
Ivan, come and get
your
bánh mì
. Zoe, come,” said Ana. She took three rolls of Vietnamese
baguette sandwiches out of a plastic bag. She had bought them from
a street vender after she got off the motorcycle taxi.

Ivan came out of his room with his
Vietnamese phrasebook and said in his newly attained language,
“Thank you. I am hungry. I eat now.” He took a seat at the small
kitchen table and bit into a sandwich.

“
Well, good news,” said
Ana. “I got a job. Bad news is I won’t be home most nights. I will
be working at Quan Bien Dong from four to ten in the evenings, six
days a week. I get Mondays off.”

“
What? What are we going
to eat?” said Ivan with his mouth full.

“
There are plenty of food
vendors on the street just outside our apartment building. You can
manage,” said Ana, and sat down at the table to eat as
well.

Zoe continued to sit in the living
room, her feet propped up at the coffee table.

Ana said, “This also means that when
you start school, you’ll have to do homework on your own. That goes
for you, too, Zoe.”

“
What school? I don’t
speak Vietnamese,” said Zoe.

“
You’ll learn Vietnamese
in school,” said Ana. “Besides, it’s a school for Russian children.
It’s about twenty minutes’ walk from here. We live here now, at
least for this year, so we need to start doing things that people
who live here normally do. This is not a permanent
vacation.”

The corners of Ivan’s mouth turned
down. He stopped eating, and pushed his sandwich away.

Sensing that Ivan was apprehensive
about his prospect at the new school, Ana said, “Ivan, you’ll be
okay. As long as you study hard you’ll get good grades like you
always have.”

“
He’s not worried about
the grades,” said Zoe. “He’s worried about the bullies.”

“
Shut up, Zoe,” said
Ivan.

“
Just make some
below-average grades and don’t be a know-it-all, and you should be
okay,” said Zoe. “Bullies can’t resist beating up nerds, so try not
to be one. Oh, and try and lose some weight. That’ll
help.”

“
I told you to shut up,
you anorexic freak,” said Ivan.

Ivan was breathing hard and fast, and
Ana could feel his fists trembling across the table.

“
That’s enough, both of
you,” said Ana.

No one said a word for a moment. Ana
wondered whether they would ever have a normal dinner where they
could all sit around the table, share stories from the day, laugh
through the whole meal, and just have a good time.

“
Everything will be fine,
Ivan,” said Ana. “You will be staying at this school for at least a
year, I promise you, and you will make friends. You won’t be
changing school every few months like before. I will do my best to
keep the job and the apartment this time. No one knows us here, and
we can all start over.”

“
That’s right,” said Zoe.
“No one here knows how screwed up we are. To the locals we are just
like the rest of the weirdoes from Russia anyway.” She grabbed her
guitar and went to her room, slamming the door shut.

Ivan pushed his chair back, stood up,
and with slumped shoulders, walked back to his room as
well.

Ana took a deep breath, and tried to
figure out how the evening had ended this way. She pondered her
errors; there had been many in her life. She had wanted so badly to
make things right, but now she was unsure whether she had the will
or the strength to do it. It would’ve been so much easier just to
give up.

“
Listen up. This is Ivan
Romanov. Let’s be nice and welcome him,” said the Vietnamese
teacher in Russian. She had Ivan stand in front of the class to
greet everyone. She then turned to Ivan and said, “I am Ms. Mimi
Tran, but you call me Ms. Mimi. Too many Ms. Tran’s out
there.”

The students giggled as Ivan took a
seat at the first row, which was the only available open seat in
the room. The long wooden desks were made to accommodate two
students each. Ivan’s neighbor was a tall, skinny boy with blond
hair, wearing a very neat white button-down shirt and a pair of
khakis. The book storage area underneath the desk was divided in
the middle, and Ivan saw that his desk mate had stuffed it with
notebooks and snacks. The chairs were also made of wood. Ivan’s
chair was a little loose at the joints, and it wobbled a little as
it received its new owner.

“
Everyone, open your
textbook and turn to page fifty-six,” said Ms. Mimi, this time in
Vietnamese.

Ivan looked over his shoulder to see
his neighbor take out a textbook with a blue cover. Ivan looked
into his backpack and found the same textbook, but he didn’t
understand what he was supposed to do with it.

His neighbor whispered to Ivan in
their native tongue, “Page fifty-six.”

Ivan quickly complied.

The first class of the day, held by
their homeroom teacher Ms. Mimi, was the Vietnamese language class.
The textbook was completely in Vietnamese. Although Ivan had been
learning a number of words and phrases from his phrasebook, he had
trouble following Ms. Mimi.

“
Ivan,” said Ms. Mimi in
Russian now, “don’t worry. We’ll catch up after school.”

Ivan didn’t know what “after school”
meant. He was told that classes ran until four o’clock in the
afternoon. Could there possibly be more schooling after that? It
was just eight o’clock in the morning, and it was shaping up to be
a very long day already.

Ms. Mimi’s class today was on simple
phrases used during travel, helpful in situations such as those
when one needed to locate a restroom. Vietnamese was a difficult
language for Ivan to learn, but he found it rather beautiful in its
various intonations and sounds.

Ms. Mimi paused and said, “Raise your
hand if you know how to say ‘I need one ticket for the nine o’clock
train to Saigon.’”

Only one hand went up. It was that of
a girl with red curly hair that draped over her shoulders, the
front of which decorated with white lace collars adorning the top
of a knee-length plaid dress in blue and gray.

“
Yes, Sofia,” said Ms.
Mimi.

Sofia stood up and translated the
phrase in Vietnamese, with no Russian accent.

“
Very good,” said Ms.
Mimi. “Hopefully we will see other hands go up next time. So,
homework is to do the worksheet at the end of this chapter.
Tomorrow we will have a Vietnamese-speaking only teacher here to
chat with each of you. Everyone will get five minutes with this
teacher in front of the class. So practice very hard at home. You
don’t want to be embarrassed. Class dismissed.”

The bell rang right on cue.

All the students rushed to get out of
the classroom, but Sofia came to talk to Ivan. She held out a hand
and said, “I am Sofia, the class president. It’s nice to meet
you.”

Ivan was stunned for a few seconds, as
he was not expecting to be greeted by a girl as pretty as Sofia. He
extended a tremulous hand and shook Sofia’s, but didn’t say
anything.

Sofia withdrew her hand and said, “I
just want you to know that recess lasts about fifteen minutes and
you need to be back in your seat for the next class, which is math.
I am sure you have looked at the schedule.” She pointed her chin to
the poster next to the chalkboard, which was being erased by two
students shrouded in a mist of chalk dust.