Fake House (14 page)

When Tuan was born, I immediately thought of this black man I didn’t kill. A karmic joke: Since you liked the first one so much, here!, have another one. I laughed so hard at the hospital, they all thought I had gone mad.

But it did bother me for weeks afterward, the fact that I didn’t, couldn’t, shoot this soldier. What kind of a soldier am I if I cannot finish off my enemy?

But then I would return, over and over, to that face, a face showing neither fear nor defiance, with its little odd bumps on the lower cheeks and a sparse goatee. If anything, he seemed embarrassed. It was as if he had just woken up and was surprised to find me standing over him. A rather feminine response, I concluded, to be embarrassed after you have been violated. It was because he was caught in a compromising position, most definitely, but then so was I. It was as if I had walked into a latrine
without knocking and found him squatting over the cement hole. “Excuse me, sir.” But what was either one of us doing in a mosquito-infested indigo forest on such an unbelievably hot summer afternoon anyway? He with his left arm missing and covered with mud? And me with both of my legs about to be blown away forever?

B
ROTHER
N
EWS FROM
H
OME

I
was the only one who could read during the war. Everyone else in my unit was illiterate. Most of us were fishermen and rice farmers from Thanh Hoa and Thai Binh provinces.

The other soldiers called me Brother News From Home. It was my job to read the letters sent from their wives, girlfriends, and mothers when these arrived every few months.

At first each soldier would bring me his letter in private. They were shy about it, almost ashamed. For my trouble, I would be paid with a cigarette, a spoonful of salt, or a sesame candy.

As we all got to know one another better, a ritual developed where I would read each letter out loud to everyone. It was our sole entertainment and consolation. Standing in the middle of a circle, with all eyes on me, I would give a dramatic performance of each missive, adding the necessary pathos, bathos, or humor through voice inflection and hand gestures.

Anyone who refused to have his letter read out loud would
be wrestled to the ground and tickled by the other soldiers until he agreed to hand over his generic secret.

There was one stubborn soldier who would light a match to his letters before anyone could see them. He was tall, muscular, but very shy. Whenever he had to look anyone in the eyes, he would bite his lip to keep from smiling.

Reading so many letters, I quickly realized that most of them were written by essentially one person: a sweet, caring, dull, and unimaginative woman. Occasionally there would be an odd detail in a letter to distinguish it from the rest. One hysterical girlfriend wrote,
They’re bombing Hanoi constantly. I almost wish a bomb would drop on me. That way that same bomb would not drop on you
[!]

In another letter she wrote,
I’m certain I will die soon. How I wish you had made me pregnant. If the child survives us, then there is proof that we had lived. If the child dies, then at least more of us had lived
.

A Catholic mother wrote,
Remember to keep the statue of the Virgin Mary in your mouth when you go into battle. Wear it around your neck at all times, except when you evacuate your bowels, then you must take it off of course. Keep it in your mouth when you’re sleeping
.

These peculiar details would illicit uproarious laughter from all those present. Crude comments were common. Each life, when examined publicly, seemed unbearably ridiculous. Of course the only ones who were never laughed at were those who never received any letters.

Although I was the designated letter reader, I myself never received any letters.

As a matter of ethics I would never change the contents of a letter as I was reading it, although occasionally, I would skip over
unnecessary words and paraphrase long-winded passages to improve comprehension.

Only once did I break my own rule. In a rambling letter a wife admitted to her husband that she was pregnant with someone else’s child. I changed it to her announcing that their house had burned down.

It was a spontaneous and harrowing performance. In front of a laughing assembly I had to improvise several hundred words without flinching. Luckily, my deceit was never found out, as the husband in question died in battle the very next day.

Because this man’s letter was incinerated along with his knapsack, my integrity as a letter reader would survive intact until the very end of the war.

F
OR
G
RISTLES

I’
m not ignorant, because I drive a truck for a living. I’ve been here and there. Once I drove all the way to Lang Son, where I could look across the border into a foreign country: China. The cradle of civilization. The Chinese buildings were different. They tended to be taller, for once, and had bits of red paint on them. Chinese buildings are not the same as Vietnamese buildings. Those who claim otherwise are stupid.

Do you know that scientists used to think monkeys were vegetarians? This fact I gleaned from reading
Today’s Knowledge
, a journal I highly recommend.
Today’s Knowledge
now claims that monkeys are not vegetarians. They only become vegetarians in zoos. Meat is too expensive, and too messy. Recently scientists were able to videotape monkeys actually eating their own kind. A group of male monkeys had chased a monkey of a slightly different coloring onto a linden tree. They stood on the ground and shook the linden tree until the stranded monkey fell down. Then
they all pounced on him and tore him to bits. The females of the tribe had been on the periphery of the action, but they, too, were able to share in the feast by trading in what you would call biblical knowledge for gristles.

No startling fact: monkeys killing monkeys. I, too, have killed a few monkeys myself, when I drove my truck down the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the war.

And just last week I accidentally killed a man when his motorbike swerved into my path. It was late at night, on the road between Soc Trang and Can Tho. Although I didn’t have my headlights on (to save gas), he should have heard me coming. He didn’t, of course, because he was wearing a helmet.

I should have stopped to see how he was doing after I ran over him, but I have a family to take care of: a wife with tuberculosis and a beautiful daughter about to get married to a Sri Lankan.

Do you know where Sri Lanka is?

Somewhere in Europe, I’ve been told. What does it matter? He offered me two thousand dollars for my daughter’s hand. Truth is, I would have given her to him for next to nothing.

My daughter Hoa, age seventeen, is the most beautiful girl south of the ninth parallel.

“Daddy, do you have to get on an airplane to go to Sri Lanka?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Will there be mosquitoes on an airplane?”

“There will be many mosquitoes on an airplane, but they will all be stuck to the floor because of the pressurized air.”

Hoa looked worried. I continued: “Listen, you’re getting married to a Sri Lankan. An older Sri Lankan, considerably older, true,
but still a Sri Lankan. You’re going to Europe, to an industrialized society where people work with shiny machines, and not off the land. There is no future in working off the land.”

And there really is no future in working off the land. Our weather is screwed up. We didn’t have a dry season this year. So much water, so many snails. That’s all my neighbors talk about nowadays: the snail plague. Go see for yourself. On every rice stalk are clusters of tiny red eggs. Snail eggs.

H
OPE AND
S
TANDARDS

I
t used to be a big deal to go to Soc Trang. Now anyone can do it. There was this miserable, vindictive road made up of rocks and potholes, which got you to the ferry landing after about two and a half hours. This ferry went back and forth often enough, but stopped operating at 9
P.M.
, and sometimes even earlier, without warning, so you had to sleep on a hammock in a dingy café all night long if you didn’t get back in time on your return trip.

Once I slept outside on the grass with my motorcycle chained to my ankle. I used a sheet of paper for my pillow. When I woke up in the morning, every inch of my skin was covered with mosquito bites. I had lain down worrying about ghosts and not mosquitoes. Maybe it was because I was drunk. (You tend to think of ghosts when you’re drunk.) I lay on my paper pillow and stared up at the grinning moon and thought about shooting star ghosts, the variety with only a head, and entrails dangling down. I also thought about the boy in my village who had slept outside one
night, only to wake up in the morning in the middle of a bamboo thicket. They had to chop through all that bamboo to get him out.

Now, with this new paved road, anyone can get to Soc Trang in less than an hour. There is no more glamour to Soc Trang. But I’ve been to Soc Trang dozens of times before, so it doesn’t really matter to me. I know all the karaoke cafés on April 30th Street. There, you will often find me sitting in air conditioning, singing the latest hits with the prettiest hostesses. I’ve even been to Can Tho three times, and once I reached the outskirts of Saigon. Generally speaking, though, it takes so much effort to go anywhere. That’s why many of us die in the same house we’re born in.

But there is really little difference between Soc Trang, Can Tho, and the outskirts of Saigon. Everywhere there are too many people living in ugly houses. I’ve lived in Vinh Tho all my life, so I’m very tired of it, but I’ve been told by outsiders that it’s a gorgeous village.

The only thing I like about Vinh Tho are the fields surrounding it. When I was a kid, I would wander the dirt roads alone late at night and pretend I was going to a foreign country. This was when there were no TVs, when we didn’t know what foreign countries were like.

I used to look at the sky and think,
This sky covers the whole earth, every single country on earth, and not just this crappy village
. I also liked to look at the sea, and the many stars above it, before my family bought me a place on a boat to escape from Vietnam. That’s how we ended up destitute. I was only ten then. Before we even got a mile offshore, they caught us.

Inside a pocket sewn shut into my shorts, I had three hundred dollars. “This should last you a year in America,” my mother had assured me. But the cops weren’t stupid. Back on land, they
strip-searched us and took everything away. In the holding cell, I saw an old woman swallow a wad of dollars, a few crumpled bills at a time, before they could get to her.
It’s better to turn money to shit
, her eyes said to me,
than to let these assholes steal them
.

What would I be now if I had made it to a foreign country? Maybe a taxi driver. I hear they make good money over there. As long as I don’t have to talk too much, I’ll be fine. Maybe I’d have my own business, something modest, a noodle shop catering to other Vietnamese.