Fake House (13 page)

S
AIGON
P
ULL

A
cross a narrow lake from my house in the center of Hanoi is a hideous-looking hotel named Saigon Pull. Built four years ago, it features a floating disco, a tinseled, strobe-lit barge that blares loud music until three o’clock each morning. Although I tried jamming wads of rolled-up newspaper into my ears, the monotonous
thump, thump, thump
still filtered through. Once I even tried bandaging the top half of my head.

However, this floating disco is not just a nuisance but a windfall. It is where my only daughter, Lai, works as a hostess. She brings home, on average, fifteen dollars a night, half the monthly wage of your average teacher.

With this income I no longer have to leave the house. Before Lai became a hostess my family survived on what I could make from selling Zippo lighters, supplemented by my tiny pension.

I had several designs for my Zippo lighters. My favorite one read, “When I Die, Bury Me Upside Down So the World Can Kiss My Ass.”

It can be translated as: “When I Die, Bury Me Upside Down So the World Can Kiss My Ass.”

I would sit on the sidewalk across the street from the Metropole Hotel, in front of a hand towel arrayed with six Zippo lighters. (There were dozens more in my satchel.) It was prudent not to show too many at one time. That way they became rare. I would sell each for five, maybe six dollars. Once, a strangely emotional man, with tears in his eyes, paid me twenty dollars although I only asked for ten.

I would also carve, for a small, negotiable fee, a tropical scene, someone’s name, or a simple greeting in French or English onto any solid surface with my penknife. Look at this cheap plastic pen, for example: See the fruit-laden coconut tree, the sun sinking into the ocean, and above it, “Good Night, My Love!”

Now I stay home all day to take care of my three-year-old grandson, Tuan. There are only three of us in my family: me, Lai, and Tuan.

Tuan is a big-boned and precocious child. Already he can recite the alphabet, forward and backward, and count to a hundred. I have taught him a few fancy words. Once, when my neighbor, Mr. Truong, was over for a beer, I said, “Tuan, tell Mr. Truong what’s inside the body?”

Tuan looked at me blankly. I nudged. “You know, the tiny little things no one can see.”

He still didn’t get it. I gave him a hint: “GGGGGGGGGG! GGGGGGGGGGGGG!”

“Germs?”

“See.” I looked at Mr. Truong. “He already knows the word germs!”

Mr. Truong was laughing convulsively. His one good eye narrowed into a slit slithering up toward the top of his nose. His mouth nearly slid off his face. “This kid speaks excellent Vietnamese!”

Encouraged, I pointed to a photograph on the wall. “And who’s that?”

“Uncle Ho!”

“And what about Uncle Ho?”

“Uncle Ho loves children!”

After Mr. Truong left, I thought of how glad I was that Mr. Truong seemed to genuinely like my grandson and had never made an off-color remark about Tuan in my presence.

Well, almost never. One time, after seeing Tuan kick a rubber ball across the floor, he raised his hands in the air and yelled, “Pelé!”

It is true that Mr. Truong likes to make a lot of far-fetched comparisons. He said that Hanoi is becoming more and more like New York. (He has never been anywhere near New York. Indeed, never outside of Vietnam.) He calls Lai “a famous actress,” and me “the general.” He said, “You look just like Vo Nguyen Giap.” An absurd comparison, preposterous. As is clear in every photograph, and I’ve even met the great man once, with a photograph in my wallet to prove it, General Giap has a round, well-marbled, toadlike face, while yours truly’s is gaunt, meatless, with eyes that bug out just a little. I have a bushy mustache, and General Giap does not. Although General Giap’s nose is mashed, beaten down, smoothed over, it does retain its full complement of accessories, while yours truly’s, I’m sorry to say,
excusez-moi
,
is missing a nostril. Furthermore, everyone knows that Vo Nguyen Giap is only four-nine, one of the shortest men in the universe, and I was, swear to God, a very tall guy. Perhaps Mr. Truong is implying that in my current abbreviated version, I’m about the size of Vo Nguyen Giap.

I’ve already decided that Tuan would never be sent to school. Why subject him to other children’s cruelty? I’ve talked to Lai about this. After she quits what she’s doing—Lai’s already twenty-five—she can open a beauty salon. We’ll call it Paris By Night. Plucked eyebrows, perms, and nails. Tuan can help out at the shop when he’s old enough, and be a beautician when he’s fully grown.

Each night, just before bed, I rub egg yolk into Tuan’s hair to straighten it out. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth a try. I’ve also been telling him to pinch his flaring nostrils, massaging them, to get them to rise up.

“Do it twenty times, Tuan.”

“But why, Grandpa?”

“Because it’s good for your nose!” At the end of each nose session, I give Tuan a generous handful of M&M’s. Imported stuff, very expensive.

Mrs. Buoi, the pudding vendor down the street, told me that the American singer, Michel Jason, soaks his body in a bathtub of fresh milk every day to achieve a light complexion. Condensed milk doesn’t work, she added.

A
nha que
ignoramus, Mrs. Buoi should stick to peddling pudding and stop dishing out advice on the latest advances in science and cosmetics. Besides, even a pint of milk costs well over a dollar. There’s no way I’m spending all of Lai’s earnings on fresh milk. I had thought of getting a pint of milk and dabbing Tuan, just
the crucial spots, maybe just the tops of his hands and the front of his face, with a hand towel. But if I apply this treatment unevenly, he’ll end up looking all mottled, like a tree frog or a napalm victim. It’s not worth the risk is what I say.

But who am I to brand Mrs. Buoi a
nha que
ignoramus? What pomposity! I should scratch the scars on my face until they bleed to atone for such a statement! Show me a Vietnamese, even the most
au courant, c’est moi
included, who isn’t a generation, at most two, removed from being a
nha que
ignoramus?

For all I know, you yourself are a
nha que
ignoramus. Perhaps, just this morning, you were standing ankle-deep in mud, planting rice seedlings with your ass aimed skyward? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. So what if you have never eaten M&M’s or bought a roll of toilet paper in your life?

You should be proud to be
au naturel, parlez-vous Français?
like a heron or a water buffalo. You should be proud to be the heir to a million folk poems no one can remember. You should be proud to be a repository of occult knowledge city slickers like me are clueless about. (Like Mr. Truong said, Hanoi is becoming more and more like New York, less and less like the rest of Vietnam.) If I look at you the wrong way, you can cause a bag of nails or a live duck to appear in my poor stomach. Because you stand in the sun all day, planting rice seedlings with your ass aimed skyward, you are robust, slightly crazed, and dark-complexioned. You know, from experience, that skin color is not constant but variable. What is skin pigment but germs that can be bleached with the right chemical?

When I first suggested the beauty salon idea to Lai, she seemed deeply ambivalent, even afraid. When something’s troubling her, Lai’s lips will jut out a little, as if she’s getting ready to
kiss someone she does not really want to kiss. She would also tilt her head back and blink her eyes rapidly. A
jolie laide
, my Lai is. I reassured her: “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I promise to never show up at your shop.”

“What are you talking about?!” She protested, tilting her head back and blinking rapidly.

“Oh, come on, it’s a beauty salon! Why would people want to see a monster in a beauty salon?”

It is true that the new generation has very little tolerance for ugliness, for whatever that is unglamorous, maimed, unphotogenic. All reminders of the war embarrass them. The war itself embarrasses them. It was a huge aberration, they’ve decided. (And they’re right, of course, but then they blame people like me for having participated in it, as if we had any choice in the matter.) They see the cash-friendly Americans on the street and cannot imagine why we ever fought them.

Each night, not being able to sleep, I lie in the dark inside the mosquito netting next to my grandson and remember incidents from my generic, yet harrowing life. Only now, at the age of fifty-three, have I achieved boredom, a kind of peace, if not happiness. I think of my wife, of our four nights together. Some men are destined for many nights of love. I was destined for four. Flesh on flesh is a lifetime memory, they say. Each night was different. In many ways I was lucky that The Uyen, the wife I barely knew, was two years dead by the time I returned from the war. I was damaged goods, useless, a nuisance.

Or I would think of my brief glimpses of Hue, the only city aside from Hanoi I have ever been in; or the b.s. I fed the pretty reporter from Quan Doi Nhan Dan about commandeering an ARVN tank and plowing it into their own bunker—“You should
have heard them scream, miss”; or the time we discovered an upturned American truck in a ravine, its driver already dead, and found, to our delight, canned ham and peaches in its cargo; or the time I stepped on an American soldier but did not shoot him, and how it bothered me for weeks afterward; or the cache of whiskey my battalion found in an overran ARVN base camp.…

During my first month in the field, I saw what I thought were human entrails dangling from a tree branch above head level. All pink and gray and dripping blood. It frightened me so much I actually threw up. When I told the other soldiers about this, they all laughed. “It was a snake, you idiot!”

Lai would not usually be home until after eight in the morning. Foreign men and Viet Kieu like to sleep late, she told me. And most of them like to talk a little after they wake up, she added, even if they have to pay a little extra.

Naturally I never ask Lai about her work, although sometimes she tells me things. We have an agreement that she can never receive a man inside the house. (With Tuan here, it would not be moral.)

Once, however, a Viet Kieu showed up on one of Lai’s nights off and insisted, begged, to be let in. Although the young man was very drunk, he was neither rude nor belligerent. After a little conference between Lai and me, we decided, what the heck, let the sorry bastard in.

“Thank you, Uncle, I really appreciate this,” the Viet Kieu said to me in a thick Quang Ngai accent, bowing like a yo-yo with his meaty hands clasped together in front of his chest.

“It’s not New Year’s yet, stop kowtowing!”

“Thank you, Uncle!”

“Just treat us like family!”

So there we were, all four of us, sleeping on two beds in the one room of my house. The Viet Kieu, fully dressed, was clutching Lai as if she was the last inner tube left bobbing on the South China Sea. Great whites were swimming beneath the bed. He babbled on about his life as a solid-waste specialist in Miami, and left before sunrise.

After the Viet Kieu left, Tuan, the little booger, said, “Was that my father?”

Although the Saigon Pull is literally only a stone’s throw from my house, it takes Lai fifteen minutes to ride around the lake on her Dream motorcycle. I always know she is coming when I hear Mr. Truong’s Pekinese bitch’s frantic barking. She always brings something from the market, sweet rice with Chinese sausage, baguettes with pâté, or vermicelli with grilled meatballs. Occasionally she also brings home foreign newspapers or magazines taken from the hotel.

Although I enjoy looking at all the photographs in these publications, even the most banal—the layout of a bathroom in a soap advertisement, for example, or the head of a hairy deer over a fireplace—what attract me most are the images of disaster: a race car bursting into flames, a riot, someone in handcuffs. It is reassuring to see people in other countries suffer, in their own house, so to speak, because the foreigners who are here now, in 1995, do not suffer.

On the front page of last week’s
Bangkok Post
was a picture of a man in a red beret, khaki pants, and white T-shirt aiming, with one muscular arm, a Bulgarian SA-93 at the face of another man lying on the ground, naked but for a pair of green socks. I have seen war, but I have never seen such a tidy tableau of warfare. I had no idea which country this was in. But since both men were
black, maybe somewhere in Africa. The naked man was clutching his crotch with one hand and trying to ward off the inevitable with his other. One of the socks was dangling from his foot. To the side, five teenagers hid behind a wall, with one cautiously peering out to witness this spectacle.

I have seen only one black man close up in my life. It was in a forest near Pleiku. We had ambushed an American patrol and were combing the area to scavenge weapons from the corpses before the helicopters came. I stepped over a fallen log onto something soft. Something moaned underfoot. It was a rather smallish black man, bleeding but conscious, his left arm missing. I can still see this man’s face today: He had these odd little bumps on his lower cheeks and a ragged goatee. I stared at this man’s eyes staring back at me. No one else was near. I kept on walking.