The Language of Men (8 page)

"I feel bad," I say to Vanessa on our walk back to the hotel. "I hope I didn't offend her."

"No, not at all," Vanessa says. "She's fine. It was an experience."

"I wonder what my Dad would think of that place. This whole place. It's like walking into one giant Hard Rock Café. All the stuff that once meant something else is on display or for sale."

"It
is
weird," Vanessa says. "But what did you expect?"

"I don't know. Not this." It was quiet for a moment. "It's amazing that you and Ngon are so close already."

"She's a really smart woman," Vanessa says. "And she's been through a lot. She lost her father during the war. That's how she put it. 'I lost my father and I look for him all the time.'"

I reach over and hold her hand. She looks up at me, then gently presses her cheek to my shoulder. It makes sense now why Vanessa is so open with Ngon. The word "father" sounds different to me when Vanessa says it, as if when the word moves between her lips, it does not have the same meaning. If Vanessa happens to mention "father" in an e-mail, the word seems to glow, cast in permanent highlighter. Sometimes I feel a little uncomfortable even saying the word "father" around her. From what she's told me, her father was a loud, dominating presence: His incessant yelling from the sidelines of her soccer or basketball games, his fits when the orange juice cap wasn't twisted tight enough, or his tirades over Vanessa's hair in the shower drain. Once, knowing he'd use the shower after her, she spelled out her name with long wet hairs on the tile wall. He didn't talk to her for three days.

The night Vanessa moved away to college, he wouldn't open the door to his apartment because she was five minutes late. He yelled out through the window, but refused to see her. She left. Soon after, his body rejected a second liver transplant, and he died.

Perhaps if I met the man I'd feel differently, but each time I visit Vanessa's family, her mother and sister sitting close on the couch chatting like girlfriends, it's hard for me to imagine him in the family. I know his death is a wound, but the three women seemed to have healed, in the way a scar pulls taut the healthy skin that remains.

I think about Ngon's father and Vanessa's father and the ways we choose to describe the dead: passed on, or in a better place, or lost. If I know exactly where my father is, then what am I searching for?

By the time we find the hotel, the sun is rising over Hoan Kiem Lake. We stop at a small convenience store for water. We wait in line behind a Vietnamese man who is also buying two bottles of water. The cashier rings him up and the man pays with a few small coins. When we approach the counter, the cashier smiles, rings up our water, and asks for triple the amount. Vanessa and I look at each other. The cashier nods. We look at the man with the water. He nods. We pay.

Lonely Planet
encourages me to barter, but I feel ridiculous, squabbling over a few thousand dong, the equivalent of pennies. My life in the United States is devoid of bargaining. I was raised to accept face value. Besides, the Vietnamese salespeople were slick: pushy men on the corners hawking U.S. dog tags or children selling Zippo lighters. A man working at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City offered me the same fake souvenirs. His upturned palms gestured to the dog tags in the display case as if he were a model on
The Price is Right.
I imagined a massive sheet metal factory tucked into the city, stamping out the social security numbers and blood types of soldiers that never lived.

Before Vanessa and I leave the convenience store, I see a tray of Army pins and patches. As I dig through, I discover another tray, this one filled with coins. U.S. coins. I wish I could say that the Eisenhower silver dollar—the same year as my father's coin—glows like the Golden Ticket or casts a halo around the store or burns in my hand like coal. But it doesn't. It's dirty and dull, buried beneath wheat pennies, buffalo nickels and a gilded Sacajawea glancing over her shoulder.

"I DON'T THINK I'm helping at all," Vanessa says. "They're either sleeping or talking on their cell phones."

We stand on the corner of a large rotary and watch the whirlpool of traffic. Earlier that day, one of her students received a call in the middle of Vanessa's lesson on STDs. She stood up from the conference table and walked to the corner of the room. Vanessa hesitated for a moment, then continued her lesson.

"Just when I was about to start talking again, she starts smiling and clapping and jumping up and down."

I lean close to hear Vanessa's voice. Motorbikes sputter past, some hopping up on the sidewalk to bypass traffic. Cyclo drivers ring bells or yell
Hey!
until we gaze in their direction. We shake our heads.

"So she jumps up and down and announces that her T-cell count is high enough for her to get pregnant."

A teenager tries to sell me a wallet with POW/MIA stamped into the leather, then he offers a Zippo that reads
Wine 'em, Dine 'em, 69 'em.
By now, I've learned the Vietnamese word for "No."

"That's good news for her, right?" I ask.

Vanessa wipes sweat from her forehead. "Yeah. But she basically told the whole class she's HIV positive and now she wants to have a baby. This is a woman who was taught it was wrong to look at herself naked."

We play a frightening game of Frogger as we try to cross the street, then follow our map through side streets of crumbling French villas and people of all colors eating croissants and drinking wine at open-air cafés. The movie house is tucked down a narrow alleyway lined with bicycles. At the end is a Vietnamese woman shaded by the Oscar Mayer umbrella on her hotdog cart. Before we attempt to ask her where we can buy our tickets, she points to a window.

"What are we seeing again?" Vanessa asks.

"Casualties of War."
She looks at me as if I still haven't answered. "Michael J. Fox? Sean Penn?"

"Oh."

"It's good. You'll like it." I smirk, thinking about when I went away for a week and Vanessa hijacked our Netflix account. I'd check my e-mail and see that
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
had been replaced with
Orgasmic Birth, The Big Lebowski
with
The Business of Being Born.
She'll humor me and watch my movies, but she's never as captivated as I am. Once, in the middle of Steve McQueen's famous car chase in
Bullitt,
she started flipping through a magazine. I wanted to shut it off. It's like when you're dying to play your favorite song for someone during a road trip and the person doesn't like the song and now you don't even want to listen to it anymore. Somehow their response affects yours. Sometimes I wonder if the films I like are just "guy movies," as my mother would say. Or perhaps the movie I'm seeing is not the movie Vanessa sees. We don't have the same connotations. Perhaps the movie I see is the movie of me watching the movie.

Carrying frosty mugs of Tiger beer, we enter the small dark theater and sit near the back. The crowd is mostly older white couples. Several people walk in as the house lights fade and I wonder where they're from.

Michael J. Fox is on a trolley in San Francisco. An Asian woman boards, takes a seat further down the car. A wood flute that could either be the original score, or one lifted from
The Karate Kid
soundtrack, fades in, and we prepare ourselves for a flashback.

I remember watching this with my father years ago. He sat on the couch, cracking open peanuts and popping them in his mouth, prefacing the action scenes with: "Good part coming up, boy." The film follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers after they kidnap a Vietnamese girl. Sean Penn plays the psychotic, trigger-happy sergeant; Michael J. Fox is a scared young man fresh out of boot camp. The soldiers take turns raping the girl. Michael J. Fox is the only one who refuses. That, to the other soldiers, is evidence of his homosexuality. Two things the platoon can't trust: a snitch and a faggot.

I look over at Vanessa during one of the rape scenes, which is as disturbing as it is loud. She raises her eyebrows and mouths the words:
Nice choice.

In the middle of the movie, I want to reach into my pocket for my headphones, drown out the actors' lines with my father's words. I must have missed something in the recording. I remember scenes in mystery movies where detectives turn up the volume on a crackling 911 call and reveal a hidden voice, a faint sound, an unidentified person in the background, breathing. I often lose track of time listening to my father's voice, my neck stiff from leaning forward, as if pressing my ear to a door:
Who's there?

The flashback that opened the film subsides to present day, where Michael J. Fox runs after the girl on the train and turns her to face him, but—sigh—it isn't the same girl. Music swells, the screen fades, and we know everything will be all right. Someday.

"That's really weird," I say as we leave. "I remembered it being a lot better."

Vanessa walks a step or two in front of me, her hands in her pockets.

"Wait up."

"It's hot," she says. "I just want to get back to the hotel and shower." She tries to hail a cyclo driver. "An hour ago, we couldn't walk ten feet without one of these guys yelling at us." She walks closer to the corner and waves her hand.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "They'll screw us. We're better off walking."

She looks at me. We had wandered around Hanoi enough times. I can find our way back.

I start walking up the street, but Vanessa stays on the corner, waving. I stop and look back. A cyclo driver pulls up and rings his bell. "Very cheap," he says. "Very cheap." He repeats the words over and over until they lose their meaning. I hold my arms out by my sides. Vanessa looks at me, then the driver and shakes her head. As we walk away, the driver peddles slowly beside us for a few blocks before he gives up and coasts across the street.

We are lost. Again. My sense of direction is never any good, but in Vietnam, it's pitiful. We have been here for three months and just when I think I know where we're going, the city clicks like a Rubik's Cube and nothing is where it should be. Vanessa lets out a long exhale and I decide to keep walking straight. I open
Lonely Planet,
but it's too dark to read. I stare at the tangle of streets in front of us.

Several street vendors are still open, selling ginger, exotic mushrooms and baskets of raw meat. Couples browse the selection and the vendors smile when the customers point to what they want. I give in and walk over to one of the vendors and point to the name of our hotel in the book. She nods and smiles, draws an invisible map in her palm, but this one is clearer than the man's in Ho Chi Minh City. She traces the lines on her palm. I read them like street signs.

We are almost there. A man holding two baskets overflowing with leafy vegetables steps into our path. Vanessa lifts her head off my shoulder and smiles. He pushes me with both hands and I stumble back. I hear Vanessa shout "No!" and I echo her, but the man reaches out for her and I push Vanessa behind me. The man's swollen cheeks and dry, cracked nose look like a tree grown around a wiry smile. He pauses when I say "no" in Vietnamese, but then holds up his basket of vegetables and points to my pockets. We quickly cross the street and at first the man follows, then he turns away. At the end of the block, I look back and he's gone.

In our room, we lie in bed with the door locked. I keep picturing the man's angry face, the way he held up the vegetables as if they were the only thing I would ever need and he was outraged that I didn't understand that. His body screamed, "What are you waiting for, you idiot? BUY THESE!" Vanessa and I had been cornered by beggars or belligerent drunks in Boston plenty of times, but this man was different. His aggression seemed specific, focused, as if he had been waiting for us.

Vietnam, the past and present, the truths and replicas, the images I see and the stories I've heard—none of it... This isn't working out the way I planned. Perhaps it's my Hollywood education that makes me assume the man with the vegetables was anything more than a random event—the wrong place, the wrong time. My father often said he didn't trust any of the Vietnamese:
They help you during the day and shoot at you at night.
But the Vietnamese were not trying to kill me or Vanessa, and Ngon and Teddy and plenty of others have been kind and generous to us, so why then do I still have this persistent suspicion or, even, fear? Is it because I've never traveled this far from home? Or that Vietnamese is the most difficult language I've ever attempted to decipher? Or is it that for years, Vietnam was not a country to me, but only a war?

Vietnam was the first televised war. One of the first reality shows, before actors were paid to act like real people. In living rooms nationwide, Americans watched bombs green as watermelons tumbling above patchwork farms. Villagers in conical hats and
ao dais
running silently from Pac Man pellets. Thatch-roofed structures, ignited by Zippos, crackling like Duraflames. For most of my generation, Vietnam remains a televised war.

I thought I came here because I was sick of war films and still-shots of my father in his hooch. Yet I retreated to a movie theater, as if the Vietnam outside offered no insight. In my father's Vietnam, women walked from hooch to hooch,
buffin' their snatches
with white rags. Old fathers sold their daughters for household appliances. Children made weapons out of Coke cans. They didn't seem related to the people outside the movie house: the families waiting in line for a puppet show; an old man guiding Vanessa and me across a busy intersection; a group of hip teenagers in a Mercedes idling at a red light.

Even the women in The Cowboy Saloon, pressing themselves against men in suits, seemed to have little in common with the women my father dealt with thirty years ago. The younger Vietnamese we chatted with in hotels or on tours didn't care about the war, and the older generations were calloused or indifferent or dead. As in most of the world, the Vietnamese we met were busy people who worked to support their families. It is disturbing yet ingenious that many Vietnamese businesses now capitalize on the war. In a single day, Vanessa and I could take a bus tour through Khe Sanh, shoot Vietnamese and American guns at paper targets, drink cocktails called Napalm or Agent Orange, eat dinner at the DMZ Bar, and catch a late-night showing of
Hamburger Hill.