Fake House (15 page)

Many people from our village did manage to escape, however, including some of the boys I grew up with. When they returned years later, they all looked rich and foreign.

Thuan was my next door neighbor. I used to beat him up all the time. He was dark and scrawny, a very ugly kid, but he escaped by boat when he was eleven. When he came back four years ago, he was this giant of a man. He stood with his legs wide apart and sat with his legs wide apart. He wore a white T-shirt with a laughing duck on it. He slapped me on the back and shouted, “How it’s going?!” Easy enough for you to say.… What do you mean “how it’s going”?! He bought everyone drinks at the café. “I can’t drink Saigon beer”—he would frown—“always gives me a fuckin’ headache! Only Tiger beer for me!” He stayed for two weeks and married the prettiest girl in our village.

It must be the cool weather that makes them so big. Near the equator, in the tropics, you sweat all your calcium and vitamins away. And it can’t hurt that they drown themselves in milk and butter all day. In our village there is only yogurt. When I have children, I will make them eat a cup of yogurt a day. There are no advantages in being a little man.

Most of the pretty girls in our village have been claimed by
the returning Viet Kieu, a development that has raised hope and standards. Even the ugliest girls are waiting to be hooked up with a Viet Kieu.

But no Viet Kieu has returned for a while. They are all married perhaps, some to American women no doubt. Perhaps the word is out that there are no more pretty women to be had in our village.

This past January a city woman reeking of imported perfume showed up at the Phoenix, our new six-room hotel, and stayed for two days. She would sit at a table at the edge of the market, sipping her iced coffee, and scrutinize all the young girls walking by. A crowd stood and stared at her from across the street. She had a certain way of stirring the ice in her glass that drew the ire of all those present. I was told that she offered certain girls five hundred dollars, others a thousand, to marry Taiwanese men. Incredibly, no one accepted.

We all know that any Taiwanese man who would come to Vietnam to buy a bride is probably old, crippled, or retarded, but it is sheer madness to pass up a thousand bucks and a chance to go to a foreign country. But I’m speaking from a male perspective, of course. No Viet Kieu or foreign women have ever come to our village to claim any one of us.

I may be stupid but I know this much: Any woman can get married if she would only lower her standards. This is not true for a man: He needs to have money, status, or looks, in that order.

Thao, one of the chosen ones, said to everybody, “Who wants to go to Taiwan when, with a little patience, you could go to America?”

Thao was nineteen, a real beauty, perhaps the last pretty girl in our village. She had an upturned nose and a face like a
chinaberry. All her teeth were real. Her only drawback was that she had no breasts and had to wear a padded bra, although the city woman couldn’t have known that.

I used to have a crush on Thao. We all did. But that was when I was just a kid, before I wised up to the ways of the world. An average guy like me can only hope to buy an illusion of love from such a pretty woman. That’s why I go to Soc Trang.

I know for certain Thao wears a padded bra. We have a tradition in Vinh Tho. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, all the youths in our village form a line to do the snake dance. Alternating boy, girl, boy, girl, and holding hands, we dance in a line under the full moon around a bonfire. Married people, old people, and kids, who are not allowed to participate, cheer us on by clapping and hollering. At the climax of the dance everyone makes a big whooshing sound and the entire line collapses forward. That’s your opportunity to grab the crotch of the girl behind you, and press your own crotch against the girl ahead of you. Thao was behind me and that’s how I found out she wore a padded bra.

The same city woman returned to the Phoenix in May. This time she only stayed for one day. A month after she left, Thao disappeared.

We all had a good laugh over it. Taiwan turned out to be not so bad after all, but Thao, after being so stuck up, was too embarrassed to say a proper good-bye to her home village. By contrast, all the girls who married Viet Kieu had big wedding banquets where they could gloat and show off their jewelry.

Cementing our suspicion, her father immediately tore down their little thatch hut to build a little brick house. This brick house already has a nickname. People are calling it “Made In Taiwan.”

Some people said her father had beaten her into making this
decision. They claimed to have heard her cry and scream in the middle of the night, but rumors are always swirling around our stupid little village, and I don’t believe half of them.

The old man, being as proud as his daughter, will not reveal where his daughter has gone. He doesn’t have to deal with us anymore, since he no longer has to pump tires and fix bicycles at the market. Living off the money she’s sending back, no doubt, he can stay in the privacy of Made In Taiwan all day long, to get drunk and sleep and get drunk.

The wine seller, Mr. Trung, the only man who sees Thao’s father regularly anymore, is letting us in on a secret. The old man has apparently told him, “No! No! No! No! My daughter did not marry a Taiwanese! We have much higher standards than that! She didn’t even marry a Viet Kieu but an American. A real American! She will sacrifice her youth to suck this guy dry! Within five years we’ll get a divorce. Then she’ll get her American citizenship. Then she’ll bring me to America. I’m not that stupid!”

C
ALIFORNIA
F
INE
V
IEW

S
trange what a pair of Levy’s jeans can do to a man’s confidence, he thinks as he sits at a window table in the California Fine View restaurant three floors above street level. A new pair of American jeans—he smiles—expertly haggled down from thirty to just twelve bucks at Ben Thanh Market yesterday.
When I first came to the city, I couldn’t even haggle
, he remembers.
I was intimidated. I used to think that if you haggle too much, they’d think you’re a destitute, stupid hick. But I’ve certainly come a long way
. He chuckles inside.
I’m wearing Ralph Lauren’s Polo Sport and a pair of leather shoes, also bought yesterday, imported from China and costing nearly a month’s salary
. Suddenly his face twitches, shot through with a surge of anger. On the pastel-yellow walls are framed photos of the the Golden Gate Bridge and the Grand Canyon.
To hell with it
, he thinks, shooing the turbulence away with a quick gulp of way-too-sweet lemonade.
Not nearly enough lemon
, he concludes bitterly.
But extravagance is an occasional necessity
, he
reminds himself.
You must be extravagant every now and then if you want to shift your paradigm. A very important word: paradigm. How serendipitous it was that I came across it in my very first novel
. And to think—he blushes—only a year ago I didn’t even know what a novel was. Now I read at least a page every night. He smiles.
People are stuck in ruts because they have never heard of the word paradigm. And then their lives are ruined. To live beyond your means every once in a while is an act of defiance. When you’re in debt, you cannot be complacent. You either sink into despair or you become creative. You must change your life
, he has read somewhere.
Renewals cost money, certainly. What bullshit
, he thinks.
I’m only dressed up to impress a woman
.

As a woman enters the room, he rises halfway out of his chair, then quickly sits down again.
And she doesn’t even look like my date
, he nearly laughs inside. A glance at his watch shows that Lan is seventeen minutes late already.
Strange how different the world can look from a third-floor window. Nothing matters from up here. People are shrunken down to size, and all of life’s horrors simply evaporate. But maybe it’s only the air-conditioning
. Across the street a legless woman surfs along on a dolly lying on her stomach. A loudspeaker next to her head crackles a Buddhist mantra.
How odd it is that I cannot even visualize my date’s face at the moment. But I do remember her name, certainly, Tran Thuy Lan, or Tran Ngoc Lan, or something like that. But if someone were to ask me anything about her appearance, for example does she wear her hair long or short, or does she wear makeup, I wouldn’t be able to tell him
.

He finishes his lemonade.
Way too much ice
, he concludes bitterly. Two tables away, a young white couple are eating something extravagant: a pastry with stuff all over it. The aroma wafts over to his table. The pepperoni is real, but the cheese is fake.
He has never eaten cheese before. He waves at a waiter. “What is that?” he whispers.

“Pizza,” the waiter answers. “Italian. Would you like to try it?”

He smiles in gratification. “Maybe later. But give me a Tiger beer for now.”

“We only have Heineken and Budweiser.”

“Say that again.”

“Hei-ne-ken and Bud-wei-ser.”

“Give me the first kind.”

He takes out a pen and writes
pi za
in his notebook. On the same page with
parrot, pistol
, and
pajamas
. It is 7:23
P.M.
He looks at the white couple again and comes to the extraordinary realization that he has never been indoors with someone of another race before.
A new paradigm
. He exhales.
I’ve seen them on the streets, sure, many times, but never in a room like this. The man is slovenly, even dorky-looking, but the woman is indeed gorgeous, with an extraordinarily thin nose and very red lips. The man is wearing Levi’s jeans and I’m wearing Levy’s jeans. I’ve never touched the skin of another race before. He catches himself raking his eyeballs across the woman’s baby blue T-shirt. But why am I looking at her while waiting for my date?

“Where are you from?”
he thinks in English.
“I’m from Manchester. It is raining hard. You can either come or stay with me. I’m the most tallest person in my family. The bathroom is outside. I am healthy, you are sick.” In about a year’s time, I should be able to master English
. He chuckles.

He looks at his reflection in the plate glass window. “Pi za,” he mumbles.
Intense eyes and serious lips. Ever since I’ve trained myself to keep my mouth shut when not speaking, my face has become more dignified and more substantial. A minimum of thirty push-ups a night
.
Fifty when I’m not too tired. The Saigon traffic is not too bad on this overcast Sunday
. A different waiter returns with his Heineken. After filling his glass, the man grins and says, “Ralph Lauren’s Polo Sport!”

He reacts with an audible sniff. “Calvin Klein aftershave!”

The waiter walks away, winking over his shoulder.
A fine place this is
, he thinks.
Except for the geckos on the pastel-yellow wall of course. The whole country is overran by geckos, sure, but there should be at least one room in Vietnam where there aren’t any of these flesh-colored lizards. The government should figure out a way to eradicate them. Pay kids to shoot them with rubber bands or something
. He takes a cautious sip of his imported beer.

He met Lan a week ago in the CD section of a bookstore, that enormous one on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street. He had come to buy his third novel—Sheldon’s
Bloodline
in a fine translation. He noticed a pretty girl holding a Trinh Nam Son CD. “Buy it,” he advised, “it’s excellent!”

She turned to him with a twinkle in her eyes.

“I have that very CD at home,” he stammered.

“I was just looking at the cover,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t even have a CD player!”

But it was probably a mistake to ask her to meet me at California Fine View
, he now thinks. A
girl who doesn’t have a CD player would probably be intimidated by a fine place like this, a well-lit place where people from all over the world gather to eat pizza and drink Heineken. Where the chairs are wood and not plastic
. But she was also wearing a jazzy and expensive blouse, he remembers, an indication that she also aspires to move up in this world.

The girl is not even here and already I’m spending
beaucoup
bucks
, he laments. He looks out the window and notices that the street has turned dark suddenly. The only lights are the lights on
the motorcycles.
But they have a generator here and this is a good beer
. He takes another sip.

It is 7:40
P.M.
The room is crowded with black marketeers and bribe takers, noveau riche and Party officials. At a corner table a dark-skinned Indian man is eating a Greek salad.
In a single day I’ve rubbed elbows with both black and white people
. He congratulates himself by ordering another Heineken.

Seven fifty-six
P.M.
and a shoeshine boy is approaching his table.
How odd
, he thinks,
that they would allow a shoeshine boy to walk into a place like this. A barefoot third-grader sporting a harelip. At least no one is trying to sell me lottery tickets
.