The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (14 page)

Xuan, meanwhile, had dropped something into the hot oil and it was beginning to sizzle. Nhi wasn’t sure what was cooking, but her stomach growled. She made a fist and ground it into her abdomen to make it stop.

Xuan had heard, though, and she giggled over by the stove. Giggling did not suit her; it was an unnatural sound. “Sit down, child,” she said. “It will be done soon.”

Nhi took a seat at the table without protest; her attention was now focused on the red silk looped around her stepmother’s neck. It was tied in a simple overhand knot, and Xuan had thrown the ends of it over her shoulders to keep them out of the way. Nhi coolly considered walking over and shoving Xuan’s face into the pot of hot oil, imagined the sound her skin would make as it fried, how the red silk would dangle into the gas flame below the pot and ignite. Then she rejected the idea—she didn’t want to burn herself. Xuan had finished cooking and was now removing little morsels from the oil and putting them onto a dish. Nhi eyed the ends of the red scarf
again. The silk looked strong, as if it could be pulled
very
tightly and not break, she thought with a sly smile.

“Naughty child,” said Xuan, as if she could perceive her stepdaughter’s violent thoughts. “Stop that. It’s time to eat.” She picked up the loaded plate and two sets of chopsticks; then she finally turned around.

Nhi noticed at once that something was wrong with Xuan’s eye. The left one. When she sat down across from her at the table, Nhi could see that it was bloodshot and watery, the veins visible, the pupil strangely dilated. The right one, however, appeared normal. Nhi didn’t want to look at her anymore. She turned her attention instead to the plate that Xuan had set down between them, piled with hot egg rolls. They were perfect cylinders, each the same size and hue. A golden pool of oil was collecting beneath them.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said Xuan. “My mother taught me the recipe when I was a girl. I learned how to shape them with her hands around mine.” She lifted her scarf up to her eye and began scrubbing at it roughly. Nhi watched the red silk move and her fingers tightened into a fist. Xuan continued speaking while she rubbed, the fabric concealing most of her face. “But I haven’t made them in years; I thought I was better than this.” She gestured toward the rolls with her free hand. The hand that still held the cloth to her eye was moving in quick little circles, like she was trying to wash a stubborn spot clean. “Better than cooking and kitchens. Better than husbands. Better than my own mother. I used to believe that I was too clever for that world.” Her hand stopped moving. “But
now I have a daughter of my own, and she will not make my mistakes.” With this, she allowed the red silk to fall away from her face.

There was now a droplet of blood in the outer corner of the eye. Nhi watched with fascination as it quivered but did not fall.

“Don’t you see? This is our place. We are the children of tradition. We must learn what we are taught, and then repeat it. Let me teach you, Nhi.” Xuan placed one of the pairs of chopsticks on the table before the girl.

Nhi unclenched her fist to take them, and saw the crimson edges of Xuan’s eye twitch. The droplet in the corner jiggled. Nhi imagined leaping out of her seat and sinking the chopsticks deep into the socket. In the distance, the leaves of the bamboo began to rustle again. She thought of her sister waiting alone in the tree, and raised her hand slowly.

“Yes. Yes, that’s it,” said Xuan, pushing the plate toward her. “This is our inheritance; take a bite.” She smiled, and the motion finally squeezed out the tear of blood. It left a thin red trail on her cheek.

Nhi hesitated for only a moment, then brought the chopsticks plunging down.

S
ISTER
E
MMANUEL WAS SILENT
. Our own egg rolls rested, complete, on the table; our mixing bowls were empty. I had been hiding my hands in my lap so she wouldn’t see the way they were still moving. “You can’t stop there!” I cried out. “What did she do?”

Sister Emmanuel gathered up the dirty dishes and brought them over to the sink, refusing to look at me. But I would not give up. “It can’t end like that! Tell me how it really ends!” I yelled, forgetting the convent walls that surrounded us, the peace I was disturbing. “Tell me! I must know!”

Sister Emmanuel still said nothing. She simply turned to face me and then lowered her sunglasses.

B
Y MORNING
S
ISTER
E
MMANUEL
had disappeared from the convent, without—as investigation later proved—taking anything with her. There was some initial disquiet when word got out, but the affair was mostly hushed up. After a few months she was never even spoken of, as if the very memory of her had vanished from this place. But how could I forget? I, who had lost both my faith and the only person on earth who knew my apostasy.

Some of the other sisters did worry when my shaking began occurring too regularly to hide, and voiced their concerns to Mother Superior. Eventually the abbess called me into her office and advised me to go see a doctor about the “trouble with my hands.” She was terribly confused when I tried to explain to her that the real problem was not with my hands but my vision.

“But your eyes are fine, dear girl!” she insisted.

“My eyes work perfectly, but I cannot see the way I used to,” I replied.

“You mean that you are going blind?”

“Precisely the opposite, Mother Superior. I see too much.”

She sighed, and dismissed me.

I’ve since learned that the only way I can stop the shaking is to retreat to the kitchen and make egg rolls. My hands remember how. It keeps the parish soup kitchen well stocked, which perhaps is the story’s happy ending. Sometimes I even sing while I work.

M
IA WORKED IN THE IMMIGRATIONS
department of the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, filing visas and dual-citizenship requests for pre-’76 Amerasians and younger mothers claiming that their child had been fathered by an American. It wasn’t the kind of career that Mia’s parents had anticipated for their daughter. She’d had a happy, healthy suburban childhood, she’d been the president of her sorority chapter, she’d even interned on Capitol Hill. She was supposed to go far professionally, not geographically. Mia told her parents that she had taken the job for the adventure, but her father, while not a particularly superstitious man, could never quite rid himself of the belief that because he had escaped Vietnam in 1973 with his life—albeit with a bullet in the left leg and damage to both eardrums—the powers of the universe had lured his only child to that godawful country thirty years later in some sort of karmic trade-off.

He never told Mia his theory, and Mia never admitted her irrational fear to her father that one day an unexpected, older Vietnamese half sibling would turn up at her office.

The mothers rarely had verification of the child’s paternity. Mia would ask them, exasperated, for any proof, for anything at all. Just a photograph of the alleged father would be sufficient to get the paperwork and interview process started, but sometimes they didn’t even know his name. They would point out the paleness of the baby’s skin, or the straightness of its nose, and seem surprised that Mia needed to know anything further.

“I swear, I would have studied genetics instead of poli sci if I’d known the job would be like this,” she said to her boyfriend Charlie one Saturday afternoon. The air-conditioning was broken in the apartment again, so they were both lying on the kitchen tile in their underwear. Charlie was too long to fit all of himself on the kitchen floor, so his legs were actually in the living room. It was too hot to even think about having sex. Mia licked her lips and continued. “Sometimes I feel like one of those Hitler-doctors from the thirties, you know? The eugenics scientists who measured people’s skulls to test whether they were Aryan or whatever? That’s all I can think about when somebody hands their kid to me and says, ‘It’s half American! Just look at it! Look at what color it is!’ Best-case scenario is when the dad’s black—makes it a lot easier to prove.”

“That’s terrible,” said Charlie, and Mia didn’t know whether he meant that her last statement had been terrible,
that she was terrible for comparing herself to a Nazi, or that her situation was terrible. She didn’t pursue clarification. It was too hot for that, too.

Charlie taught English at the Australian International University even though he was American. If he ever worried about color it was over whether or not he should spell it with a
u
.

Mia had only been in Ho Chi Minh City for two months when she met him at a Lunar New Year celebration in the park. Even in the frenetic whorl of firecrackers and screaming children and leaping lion dancers that night, they spotted each other—two freckled, blond beings obviously far from home. Mia fell into Charlie’s circle quickly. His friends were all foreign and therefore transient: They were English teachers and backpackers who had gotten sidetracked and lingered, they worked at embassies and nonprofits, they always left eventually. They had all arrived in Vietnam telling themselves that it was only temporary yet wanting more than anything to fit in. They thought their old lives were something that could be husked, but when it became apparent that they were not, they sought out the comforts of home together: American fast food and French bakeries and Italian coffee. The group shrank when members left in search of other jobs, to start families, to find somewhere to live that was quieter and had better weather, but fresh expats always came along to fill their places.

On any given night of the week they could be found drunk in a spectacularly public fashion around the bars of District 1. Mia and the girls tottered down the street in stilettos that were not engineered for crooked Vietnamese pavement, and Charlie
and the boys wore their old rugby jerseys and drank as much liquor as they wanted because it was cheap. After the bars closed they bought Saigon Beer from twenty-four-hour convenience stores and drank on the sidewalk like locals, the girls perched on the laps of the boys because they wouldn’t sit on the ground. If men lurking on motorbikes heckled them from the shadows, the boys would throw their empty cans at them until they stopped. At the end of the night they stuffed seven people into one taxi because they had spent all their money on cocktails. It was the only way they knew how to entertain themselves here.

After six months of primarily intoxicated dates, Charlie moved out of his boardinghouse in District 2 and into Mia’s consulate-provided apartment with unreliable electricity. He didn’t have much, even though he had been in Vietnam a year longer than Mia: one box of books, one bag of clothes, his computer, and a large ceramic bust of Ho Chi Minh with a broken ear that he had fished out of a trash can on a whim and grown attached to. He managed to move everything over to her place in a single motorbike trip—the book box between his knees, Mia on the seat behind him with Broken-Ear Uncle Ho cradled in her arms, and the bag with his clothes and laptop between them. But though he lacked material possessions Charlie wasn’t hard up for cash, nor was he a “hippie-dippy love-child commie apologist,” which was what Mia’s father would have called him had he known Charlie existed. Charlie just didn’t accumulate things. Mia, on the other hand, did not travel light. She had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with three
suitcases of clothes alone, but half the items were impractical for the heat and the other half didn’t fit her after the first month because she wouldn’t eat Vietnamese food and her weight plummeted. It was Charlie who took her to get her clothes tailored and coaxed her to eat at restaurants she would have never gone into by herself and persuaded her to sign up for a language course even if he couldn’t make her practice.

He was good to her, but he wasn’t perfect. Mia looked over at his lanky body next to hers, sprawled belly-up in a pair of checkered boxers. His face and forearms and lower legs were tanned gold, but the rest of him was pale, splotched pink in places from the heat. He was the color of some sort of Italian dessert, she thought. Mia was very aware of the fact that Charlie had had relationships with several of the female Vietnamese teachers at his school, and at least once with an older student. Everyone in their circle knew, and Charlie had never tried to hide it from her. She remembered going out for ice cream on one of their early dates and seeing Charlie’s face suddenly freeze in horror, mid-lick.

“What’s wrong?” Mia had asked, and turned, following his gaze, to see a Vietnamese girl, young (but they all looked so young—even the middle-aged ones—didn’t they?) and quite beautiful, with a waterfall of dark hair, looking at Charlie with tragic eyes from across the room. He had hustled Mia out of the café promptly.

“An ex,” he explained. “A crazy one.” She had worked in his foreign language department, he told Mia, and used to practice her English with him. She was cute and had seemed
like a normal girl. A modern girl. They would go out together for drinks and karaoke and it was fun at first. “But after we slept together once she just assumed I was going to marry her,” he said flatly. He had been honest with her—other guys would have played along for the sex and then dumped her later on, he said. But Charlie told her straight out that he wasn’t looking for a wife and gently suggested that they break it off, since they wanted different things. “And then she went completely insane!” he said. “She scratched my face up and stormed off, but then for months afterward she kept calling me and showing up at my place, banging on the door and screaming how much she hated me or how much she loved me. It was scary. I don’t want her to jump you with a knife or something. Not that I think she really would,” he had added quickly, seeing Mia’s face.