Grass Roof, Tin Roof
- Book Review,
by Dao Strom
Amazon.com
One difficulty of novels with multiple stories and points of view is that readers can become attached to an especially charismatic character and not want to relinquish him or her. So it is with Grass Roof, Tin Roof, Dao Strom's thoughtful and adept debut. The book begins in Vietnam on the verge of the Communist takeover and describes the dangerous career in political journalism of Than, a young woman whose real aim had been to write a romantic serial inspired by Gone with the Wind. Than's lover and mentor, a mysterious figure named Giang, has been signing his own articles with her name, and eventually, although the words are rarely hers, Than acquires the manner and confidence of an investigative reporter. When the newspapers are shut down, and Than gives birth to Giang's illegitimate daughter, she has little choice but to leave for America. Another writer would stop the tale at this crucial transition, but Strom's novel is not a simple love story set against brutality and oppression. Like a vine, her narrative twists and pushes forward, flowering at unexpected points. The American portions of Grass Roof, Tin Roof are as well sustained, if not as vividly hued, as the opening. If we regret the shift in focus away from the engaging Than, we are soon enough drawn into the lives of Than's children and their Danish-born stepfather. Dao Strom, like the child of Than and Giang, was born in Saigon to a literary mother and brought to America as an infant during the 1975 exodus. With a sagacity that belies her youth, she evokes the divided mind of the refugee and the child of two cultures. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
Strom's debut novel traces a Vietnamese family's bumpy path to immigration and assimilation in California. Trinh Ahn Tran is a freethinking Saigon journalist in the 1970s-one of few such women-known for witty columns that critique all sides of Vietnamese politics. Interrogated and increasingly harassed by the government, Tran flees Saigon with her two children in a 1975 airlift. In California, she marries a condescending, authoritarian Danish immigrant, Hus Madsen, who frightens and alienates her children as well as his and Tran's own daughter. Strom tells the story from the alternating perspectives of mother, son and two daughters. Her description of the Saigon newspaper office and the flight from Vietnam is gripping, and she offers some affecting scenes of the family's tenuous suburban existence as well: a redneck accuses Hus ("Hoss") of shooting his dog in a tense confrontation. Tran's withdrawn teenage son, Thien, gets stuck in a paralyzing relationship with his girlfriend, Valerie, whose recitation of AA mantras drives him nuts. Strom's characterizations are uneven, however; she could have used a lighter touch in depicting Hus's cruelty, and the sections about idealistic middle daughter April and the trip she takes to Saigon in 1996 are less effective. The narrative loses steam as it turns to the children's coming-of-age struggles, which tend to be familiar fare about first sexual encounters and racial identity questions. With her spare, matter-of-fact prose, Strom shows promise, but she doesn't manage to sustain the narrative tension and acuity that distinguish the first half of this novel.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Addressing the immigrant experience, this debut novel presents the story of a Vietnamese woman named Tran Ahn Trihn, who comes to the United States with her two young children during the Vietnam conflict. Settling around Sacramento, CA, Tran eventually marries Danish immigrant Hus Madsen, and with their child, April, they live together as a blended family. Strom's characters are all strong in their own way, and the story is told in a series of vignettes incorporating their varied voices. These perspectives offer interesting commentaries on the human spirit, but, unfortunately, the character development stalls with the rapid shifting of characters and story lines, which eventually leads to some confusion about whose story is being presented. Despite its fine writing and admirable scope, this novel is not pieced together strongly enough to maintain the interest of general readers. Recommended, with reservations, for large, well-funded public and academic libraries serving Vietnamese American populations; all others should probably pass.Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Strom's characters are all strong in their own way..."
Review
Strom's characters are all strong in their own way..."
Book Description
In this stunning novel about a Vietnamese family resettling in the isolation of California gold country, Dao Strom investigates the myth of westward progress and the consequences of cultural displacement.Told from multiple perspectives and interwoven with the intimate reflections of a middle child, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance, but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family. The children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms.In delicate, innovative prose, Strom's characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1Fire HazardsMy mother collected newspapers. Mostly Vietnamese publications sent to her by old friends now living in San Jose or Los Angeles. She clipped articles and stowed them in binders and envelopes, supposedly to be organized into some form of record at some later date. My mother was apt to get lost in a task, so enamored was she by the possibilities — the wealth — of information, and so reluctant, too, to reach any end that might force her to admit unrequited ambitions. Who is to say if she would actually need to look again at any of these papers? Yet she could not throw them away. My father, who had also thrown away a past — his by choice, however — criticized my mother for refusing to let go of pain. He called her selfish. "Your mother," our father would say, not unfacetiously, "your mother is a fire hazard." And I would take this in. Certainly he meant her papers, but in my young mind it was she I saw going up in flames, up into black curling smoke. It was her hair I saw shriveling to ashes and rising, her flesh melting; it was her eyeglasses I saw exploding from the heat and then — as in the movies—only the frames that survived and landed, with a dramatic thunk, at the edge of a circle of ashes. It would be the end of a scene, the glasses in the foreground of a low-angle closeup shot in which smoke and a few glowing embers of orange were a blur in the background. My mother would be gone from me; I feared this constantly. She was vulnerable and a little afraid of the world and smaller than average. She sat on a pillow when she drove and wore high heels everywhere, even at home. Whenever she went alone to a movie or to run an errand, I prayed for her safe return. I worried she might be kidnapped by a strange man as she crossed a parking lot, and we would be left to live with just our father. It is true my mother almost burned to death once in her childhood. She was playing in the kitchen with her older brothers when they turned on the stove and accidentally set her on fire. It was a gas stove; the flames jumped, or my mother was standing too close. If it had not been for an aunt passing unexpectedly by the house that afternoon, that might have been the end of my mother, then and there. But the aunt threw a blanket over her and saved her. My mother was six years old. She later told me this story as a kind of justification: it was the reason she never taught us how to cook. As for my mother's collection of newspapers — these have since been thrown away, too.papierIIt was a grand story with many events and an inconclusive ending, and it left her with an ache in her brain and heart, a feeling akin to wanting. Wanting tinged with amazement and understanding — the ending would always be inconclusive — and this was why the story worked as well as it did; this was why it was so affecting and rending and lingering. For many nights afterward, she went to sleep wishing she could live this story and picturing herself after the experience a wiser, sadder, nobler person. Or she liked to imagine meeting a man who had lived through such an experience, a humble, beaten man whose integrity only she would recognize, and she would be his friend. She wouldn't ask for more than that. She had been introduced to the story by a man whom she knew only by his first name, Gabriel. He was a French war correspondent living intermittently in her country and his own. When she met him in 1969, she was twenty-four years old, unwed with one son, then a toddler, from a previous relationship, and she was taking French and English literature and language classes at Saigon University, where Gabriel often came to visit the teachers, many of whom worked on the side as interpreters. She had aspirations of being a writer or artist; she hadn't decided yet which kind. On her first date with Gabriel they saw an American movie about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, starring Kirk Douglas. The theater was mostly full of American GIs and foreign news correspondents and their Vietnamese dates or associates, English-speaking, local advocates of democracy — writers, teachers, print and broadcast news reporters and employees, students, businessmen, travel guides, and ambitious prostitutes. Tran did not align herself with this latter group, and trusted Gabriel did not either, though she knew it would look suspect, a local woman on the arm of a foreign man. Her foreign man, the Frenchman, however, was obviously not a soldier; for her sake, he wore his press jacket (she had insisted on this, wanting the distinction to be clear, but had told him it was because she liked him better in the jacket). His build was also too slight and reserved for a soldier, and he was older, with a long face and faintly smiling, thin lips. Tran thought Gabriel's deep-set eyes — with their yellowish hazel color, behind wire-framed glasses — held an intellectual, disenchanted cast. The movie was maudlin and heroic, this in a time when such sentiment in the movies was still cathartic — though it is likely any movie featuring the likes of Kirk Douglas would have been cathartic at that time, at that outpost. Already a sense of hopelessness and consternation pervaded the streets, though people seemed to be laughing, selling, buying, venting opinions, and eating and drinking with all the usual fervor; it was this fervor, in fact, that seemed now volatile and dangerously indifferent. Tran felt watchful in public places. And though she would in all sensible mind claim not to admire any military, she looked with a naive respect, even a deferent longing, toward the American military men, for the very details of their dress and physicality (the size and stoutness of their bodies, the muted colors and fitted cut of their clothes, their sweat-rings that seemed evidence to her of their formidability rather than — as it seemed with the local militiamen, whose uniforms always sagged — their inability to cope) had in her mind aligned themselves with a concept of order. Tran was wiping her eyes when the lights came up at the end of the film, and when Gabriel asked why, she replied in her cautious French, "I understand very well the melancholy of the life of an artist." She had actually meant to use the word l'angoisse, but when la mélancholie slipped out of her lips she realized this was more right: a more subdued, less violent — more poetic, even — portrayal of the pain she had meant. Suddenly the small theater trembled in a great ground-shudder and there was a muffled boom and the noise of commotion outside. Inside, people began to panic and run for the exits. Gabriel took hold of Tran by both shoulders, pushed her into a corner against the stage. She felt the rough efficiency of his body pressed suddenly, unsexually, against hers — she felt more conscious of this than of the rumbling walls, to which she had already surrendered her fate in the first instant. With intensity Gabriel was watching the crowd, craning his neck. His body blocked Tran's view and she found herself staring at the fine brown hairs of his chest, visible through the folds of fabric between his shirt buttons. She closed her eyes. Then the shaking stopped. They made their way toward an exit, and when they came out onto the street they saw the throng of people gathered in front of the bookstore and mail depot, its front now blown open and billowing black smoke. Three Vietnamese civilians writhed on the sidewalk in front of the mess, crying in pain; a few local policemen and Americans were running toward them. Gabriel directed Tran to wait at the back of the crowd. "I have to work," he said. Then he took his camera out of the small canvas satchel he wore slung over his shoulder. Tran watched his back (his shirt half untucked, the seat of his pants rumpled) pushing through the crowd. Later, much later, they would define the bombing as fate — not necessarily to say that their relationship was doomed, but that this omen was representative of what was to come, or the nature of how things were to open between them.The novel he had recommended to her was an American classic, Gone With the Wind. They read passages together ("If you want to learn English you must read this story," he'd said; "there is not much good about the English language except this story"). It was Gabriel's favorite American novel for a couple of reasons: one, he saw it as a great depiction of "the American insistence upon naivete"; and two, he liked those literary classics by authors who had never intended to be authors, who said all they needed to in one book alone. There was something more honest, more respectable, this way, he theorized, as if the book, the story itself, had forced its way out of the reluctant author, rather than the other method, where the story became tangled up in an author's ego. This author was a woman (which appealed to Tran) in the 1930s, and the novel had a good dose of everything: the rise and fall of vanities and societies, births and deaths, unrequited loves, illegitimate children, an irrepressible heroine, a scandalous hero. And at the center of it, a civil war between North and South, something relevant. Occasionally Tran and Gabriel would discuss the parallels between life and literature and politics and cultures, which spanned years and seas. Tran did not always understand Gabriel's theories but was drawn in by his wry spirit, the nonchalance with which he delivered his well-informed and devastating perceptions about current politics, the same politics that only distressed Tran's Vietnamese colleagues and sometimes confused Tran; she could easily find merit in every point of view. In fact she somewhat admired Gabriel, his aloofness, his sense of comedy, which was almost cruel and thus took on another quality — acerbic, tragic, self-denying. How did one become like this, she wondered, so intellectual and so resigned yet not resigned, by sheer virtue of a commitment to that very attitude? The more time she spent with him, though, the more she began to see cracks in his mask. When they practiced reading in her language, his accent was slow and clumsy and almost embarrassingly earnest. The way he would point to objects on the street (phone booth, gutter pipe, spokes of a bicycle wheel) or a part of her body, and ask her the words that named these places, these appendages. His candor and his deep, eager, fumbling voice repeating after her at first surprised her; she saw a man who desired to be someone other than he was, whose knowledge and wit encumbered rather than enlightened him. She understood then the grace, the simplicity, he saw in her — and the lack of which he despised in himself. Thus did clumsiness and a hidden vulnerability become the characteristics she associated with white. His white body, covered in dark curling patches of hair, was long and awkward and remorseful when they made love. His white linen shirts, wrinkled and sweat-stained. His white skin that seemed so thin and unsuitable a cover, especially under the tropical sun, and made nudity look unnatural (she soon developed the impression that white people were meant always to be clothed, that it was their more natural state). Yet he was her vessel and gateway both, to a strange vision of power and regret, to so much of the outside world she didn't know how else she would ever reach. Though she did not think she loved him, at times she felt sympathy for him. Then she began to experiment with trickery. Things like: when once he pointed to the arch of her foot, she gave him the word for the palm of her hand, and told him the palm was the arch of the foot. How often would he need these words anyway, she would think, as she swapped other words and objects. Doing this caused her to realize how arbitrary and tenuous the association between an object and its linguistic representation could be, in some cases absurd, even. She did not know why she tricked him like this. It was a joke that paid off only much further down the line, to another audience, and she, the initiator, would never witness or know of its end. The only satisfaction she received was in knowing she was effectively deceiving someone. And these were not outrageous untruths, just pointlessly misdirected facts. Language, she saw, was a thing that relied on faith. When Gabriel's assignment in Saigon ended in 1971, he returned to France; someone else had always been there waiting for him. Tran was not mournful and told him confidently that she wished him well and would not miss him, that theirs had been what it was for the time it was — an intimacy enabled yet limited by the temporal circumstances of war, a situation wherein people like him (more than her) could for a period disinhabit the more regulated life to which they must eventually return. Tran was not an impractical woman; back in 1966, when the man who was her son's father had denied any involvement with her, she had learned her first lesson about the potential disappointments of love. In short, she had learned not to count on reciprocation. He had been a slightly older man, an established schoolteacher in their community, and he had introduced her to much about philosophy and the creative life. For the first few months after discovering she was pregnant with his child she had pursued him, demanding either money or that he marry her, and he had laughed her off, claiming that her relationship with him was merely a schoolgirl fantasy. Where the live proof came from, he had said, he would leave to speculation. Tran had felt crushed, indignant, humiliated.She went to a fortuneteller who informed her she should not try to marry before the age of thirty, as all her lovers would either die or leave her. And a man from far off would come for her one day. "I tell this to many women, it is true, to keep their hearts awake, their hopes up, but to you I mean it," the fortuneteller had said. And for the first time in her life Tran had experienced the resolve of knowing. Yes, she would have the child, but she did not want or need the father. Her own father was shamed and her mother heartbroken when Tran announced her decision. But they could hardly deny the presence of new life when it arrived. Tran would not know until many years later that in 1975, not long after she left for America, Gabriel had returned to Saigon looking for her, had gone knocking on doors of old friends asking after her. In the end she would never know for certain if the man from far off she finally reached was even the correct one.It is said love can move any mountain is how she began her version of the story, and love comes to us when we are not looking, when we have turned our backs on its very possibility, have resigned ourselves to the longing. Yet when it comes, we know it from the first moment the would-be object of our affection appears. We know love by both the dread and excitement in our hearts, by the resistance our minds raise against what our hearts are straining toward; we know it by the fact that we cannot stop it once it starts to happen and suddenly the world is full of a sense of great and imminent change just ahead: the most minute detail overflows our senses now with the indescribable pleasures of hope. It was heavy-handed and sentimental and she recognized this, but it was the best she could do on a first try. She also believed that what came out first was rawest and truest, and should not be revised, to uphold its integrity. She had no diligence for backtracking. She was a young writer. Eager to expel her words.Her story was commissioned to appear as a daily serial novel in one of the city's independent newspapers. A writer friend had secured the assignment for Tran, and it was to be her first citywide publication. A big step, for she had previously published only a few articles and short stories in reviews and smaller papers. "This editor, you have heard of him, he can help you," her writer friend assured her, "as he has helped many like us." The man her friend spoke of was the paper's chief founder and editor, but because of his notoriety in politics, he and others had decided his affiliation would be best maintained as an unofficial relationship. Only his close colleagues knew his role. He filtered decisions through a young, posing editor in chief, and any actual writing he did he credited to other writers (some of whom existed, some of whom did not). His physical presence in the office was explained as visits to friends or consultations as a technical adviser. He shared a semiprivate office with the senior reporters, and entered and exited the same way most of the staff did, through a back-alley entrance. For the most part, he was not recognized and went about inconspicuously under his assumed name. He had assumed names at least five other times in the past fifteen years, and had still been jailed four times for what the ever shifting government had labeled "the creation and advocation of slander and/or immorality." He had been dubbed a "gadfly." But he took no side wholeheartedly when it came to the subject of the war — not the Communist, not the American, not the South Vietnamese — for he believed each to be a flawed system. Rather, he believed the true source of all troubles between humans ran someplace far deeper than politics. It was under his latest name, Le Hoang Giang — a nom de plume alluding to the evanescent quality of autumn, translated literally from the Chinese as "yellow river" — that Tran met him. He was thirty-four years old, an unassuming presence, slender, with kind eyes, a long, gentle face, and a warm smile. His hair was black, his skin very brown. A hint of knowing and humor lingered about the edges of all his expressions, as if he were continually assessing but withholding judgment. In a crowd, he was likely to retreat, to stand against a wall or leave without warning or good-bye. "Tell me your idea," he said brusquely the first time she sat down before him. As she began to speak, he rested one hand on his cheek and fixed his lucid gaze upon her. "I want to write a love story based on the American novel Gone With the Wind — you have probably heard of it," she told him, suddenly unnerved by his attention. "I want to set it in our country, but follow the same story line as the original. At least in essence I want to follow it." He smiled as he leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. On the opposite side of the street below was a sidewalk café that was a popular hangout for the paper's writers and supporters; it occurred to Tran he could have been staring out the window minutes ago and seen her seated at a table down there, awaiting her appointment with him. It was raining, and the sound of water beating on the tin roofs was like nails in a metal can. Rain dripped in heavy streams from the eaves outside the open window. "I read that book a long time ago," said Giang. "I found it moving. And so thorough. You must've been just as moved by it as I was." It didn't seem necessary to respond, but out of respect Tran said, "Yes, Uncle." She felt she must address him formally, as her elder. He looked at her again. "What will happen in your version of the story?" She told him: instead of Atlanta at the crumbling of the Southern Confederacy, it would be the northern port town of Haiphong at the climax of French rule. The heroine would be from a rice farm in a small northern village, and her family devout French-influenced Catholics. The family would be forced to flee south at the advance of the Viet Minh, and the story would follow that passage, which would bring the heroine to Haiphong. "But mostly I want it to be a love story," explained Tran. "The heroine is torn, you see, because she is in love with a childhood friend who has gone off to fight for the Viet Minh. Then there will be a second man, who is committed to neither the French nor the Viet Minh — he just wants his own personal freedom — and he falls in love with the heroine and pursues her though she tries to deny him. She herself is apolitical. She doesn't want to go any farther south simply because she is waiting for her childhood love to find her again. Maybe my story will reflect some contemporary issues. The heroine might find herself suddenly on opposing sides from the man she loves and once could trust, but mostly, to be honest, I'd like for my story to focus on the personal, emotional lives of its characters. When it comes to literature, that's what I'm truly interested in, you see." "Yes," said Giang, seeming bemused, "life is never interesting unless one is in love with another who is in love with something or somebody else." He was looking at her now, but Tran felt as if he were speaking more to the space behind her than to her directly. "Where is your family from?" "I was born in Van Dinh in the north and in 1954 we fled south. My family — my mother, most of all — is Catholic." "And where does your desire to be a writer come from, then?" "Ever since I was a child I have sought comfort in books, in stories," Tran said. "My family was poor and my father could not pay for me to get a proper education, yet I insisted. I read every book I could get my hands on, I begged my brothers — who did get to go to school — to share their lessons with me. I had many disagreements with my father until finally he allowed me to take a class here and there. Then I worked hard and paid my own way through university." Giang gazed at her placidly. Then he nodded. "It is no new thing, you know," he said, "this story of men going off to war and women waiting in anguish for them to return. Every continent in the world knows this story." Tran didn't speak, unsure if he meant to belittle her ideas. He sat forward, laying his forearms on the desktop, his back slightly bowed as if he were about to stand. He turned his face toward the window for a moment. She could hear the hum of activity on the floor below, voices and typewriters and drawers slamming and laughter and footsteps. Finally Giang spoke: "I want you to write whatever you wish, and I will see that it gets published. Do you know, little sister, that is all I want to do myself? I am starting to think the only reprieve we will ever get from this war is when we are able to create — and it won't lie in our hands, but in our minds alone." He smiled sadly. "Every day I am more tired. Last night we were up very late, working. As usual." He laid his hands flat upon the desk. She noticed they were large, his fingers long and tapered. "Thank you, Uncle," she said finally, understanding it was time for her to go.Giang would tell her months later (when all formality between them had truly dissolved) that he'd witnessed his fate in life sealed one morning in 1955 in Hanoi. He had been eighteen years old. He'd written his first political essay criticizing the disunity of their nation (though he'd been cautious and also frankly undecided enough to cast no direct blame on either North or South government), and it had found its way into the dissident literary and intellectual scene that was forming at that time in the North. The essay was not a spectacular piece of writing; it was naive and spirited but had at its heart a certain lament — a sincere sadness over what was being lost at the partition of their population. An elderly established writer Giang respected called and wanted to meet him; Giang agreed to travel from Pleiku, where he had been studying, to Hanoi to meet the writer that weekend at the south end of Hoan Kiem Lake. But Cuong Phong (the name Giang wrote under at that time; not as subtly poetic in meaning, it translated awkwardly as "strong wind") never made it to the café:a flu inexplicably gripped him the night before and he stayed in his hotel room, sweating with fever. He neglected even to send a message. On his way out of the hotel the next morning, he learned that several bistros near the lake had been bombed the previous evening, and the man whom Cuong Phong was to meet with had been killed. The then–Cuong Phong walked out of the hotel and up the street seeing everything with intensified exactness. So that he stared, and the world of hearing left him. The unfamiliar city's gray streets and rusting metal gates and thin, dull silver-and-black bicycle tires and brown wood sidings and brown faces struck him; even the gray stripe of sky between two houses seemed solid and throbbing. He kept his head down as he walked but felt the heat and the stirred air around each body he passed. He crossed a street and stepped onto an ornate footbridge spanning a portion of the lake. From the north end of the lake, he could see the south end — the row of storefronts, the new cavernous holes in two of them, the surrounding storefronts with their awnings and curved balustrades intact. He turned his eyes toward the water and rested his arms on the rail of the bridge. For several minutes he stared at the dark surface of the water. He did not notice the elderly woman who had stopped beside him, put her hand on the rail, and leaned forward to peer into his face. She was asking if he was ill. "No, no," he said, trying to shake himself out of his fog. "I'm fine. Please let me be." The woman glared at him and said nothing for a moment. Then she declared, "That is what is wrong with you young people these days. You are all trying to do everything on your own. You forget you were born tied to your mothers." He didn't know how to respond. He frowned, confused. "Where has respect gone these days?" continued the woman, her voice rising. "You young people are all ill." He put his head in his hands. "Ba," he said, using the proper address for a young man speaking to an elderly woman, "I am sorry. Forgive me." He repeated this several times, deeply frustrated, as the old woman continued to regard him with her stoical expression. Finally, though he knew it was the rudest gesture he could make, he turned his back and walked away without excusing himself. And years later, the moment still resounded in Giang's mind. He heard himself repeating those words and felt how they continued to fall short, words so impotent, he told Tran, "and me repeating them again and again with an excruciating yearning." They were lying together in a borrowed bed in some other colleague's apartment (arrangements like this were necessary, as Giang was married and they were hesitant to go to Tran's apartment for fear her neighbors would talk), as he told her his story. "You ask, so I tell you. That is why I write," he said, "because I've not forgotten the feeling of being on the bridge that morning with the old lady. I've still found no satisfaction with it. None."Phuong-Li did not care for politics. To her it was a futile way to expend one's energies, and she did not understand the tension it stirred among people, the long heavy silences and sharp looks and charged nonchalance that passed now among her peers who held varying views. Phuong-Li merely wanted to play with old friends as they had when they were children, chasing each other about in the rice fields or laughing at something simple like the nickname Snake she had given one boy because he could not pronounce his words correctly and he spit when he talked fast. "Why do you call me that?" the boy asked her once. "That is my secret," Phuong-Li teased him, and her other friends giggled. The boy, because he was fond of her, was flattered by her attention, no matter what the reason, so he answered to the name Snake. Phuong-Li liked to recall these small, clever childhood games; they gave her a sense of importance, of secret control. Years later she saw the boy she had called Snake. He was now nineteen years old and had been away at school. What kind of school she did not know exactly, for she'd never asked. School was school, that vague process a few children, usually boys, went through. And when they returned, people bowed with deeper respect to these sons, and mothers blushed with adulation if it was their own sons returning in such style, for to parents, schooling meant potential wealth. To Phuong-Li, it meant very little. He came to her family's house with another neighborhood friend, and when Phuong-Li's little brothers opened the door, the friend asked for her. Snake hung back, his hands in his pockets, and looked at his feet. When Phuong-Li came to the door, he waited to see if she would recognize him before he spoke. She did, and jumped forward to embrace him. Time and what she considered to be maturity had made her magnanimous toward all past acquaintances, close or not. He raised his face and smiled, showing warmth and something else, a certain light at seeing her again. It was in her eyes as well, though she did not realize it. "You've grown up to be so pretty," he exclaimed. "And you've learned how to speak properly!" she teased him. "I've learned many things" was his demure response. "Yes, I've learned lots of awful and good things." The stiltedness in his tone almost bothered her, but she dismissed it as some new style of speech; she was too caught up noticing how good he looked after these years away, the way he now held himself, the confident tilt of his head, the lazy sureness in his smile and in his calm, smart eyes. Later, he smoked cigarettes with her older brothers while discussing politics and life in the city. She did not listen to their words, did not recognize that they were secretly probing one another with statements meant to provoke responses that would reveal their true allegiances. She did notice a tension in the air, although it only made her lament to herself: Why could they not all get along like old friends, like they used to, instead of indulging in all this tiresome talk? She admired the way Snake spoke, though, his easy mannerisms, the fierceness that lay beneath his composed veneer, showing itself only in small movements — the quick, forceful lift of his chin at a sound in the kitchen, the brusqueness with which he struck his matches. She thought he must be saying important, intelligent things, even if she did not understand them. No, she cared nothing for politics. After that day, all she cared about was love.In the spring of 1972, Tran was in her seventh week of writing daily installments. She woke early in the morning and brewed herself a cup of coffee in the apartment where she now lived with her six-year-old son. They lived alone, the two of them, because Tran had felt her sisters and religious mother could not understand the life of a writer, especially when it was a woman who sought such a life. Tran stood over the small stove in the far corner of the first-floor room, gazing each morning at the wall as she fried an egg for her son, her thoughts drifting to another world, of horses and hoop dresses and colored silks, of idle, well-educated, well-mannered women, servants announcing visitors in doorways of parlors. Tall, handsome, white-skinned men in waistcoats. They bowed and kissed the ladies' hands. And from this place her thoughts would then drift into the world of Vietnam. But she was unable to conjure any images of a parallel world here, only a vague sense of longing. The world of Vietnam was too visceral and incongruent next to the polished drama of the America in her mind. Even her imagined version of Vietnam — the bustling port town of Haiphong in 1954, the setting of her story — was humid and overcrowded and raw. (It resembled present-day Saigon, the only experience of a city from which she had to draw.) There were no equivalents here to the panoramic views of rolling green hills outside windows of estate houses, as existed in that other land. Even the war here was not so noble and deeply felt a calamity as it seemed to be there. Here the war was bogged down by the clearly unromantic facts of industry and contradicting chains of command, and it often stretched on for months without incident. And when an incident did occur it was always outside the city limits, far enough away to seem almost — though not entirely — irrelevant. As for the views outside Tran's windows, they were of the stucco walls of neighboring buildings. The inner walls of her own apartment (which she would stare at for hours each morning as she typed) were pale blue and cracked. The only decorative architectural elements were the concrete blocks with rough-edged patterns of ellipses and curved diamonds cut into them, which fitted into the windows as screens. When the sunlight came through, it cast these patterns in shadow on the concrete floor. Tran slid the egg she had cooked into a bowl and set it before her son, Thien. While Thien ate, she combed his hair. Sometimes she would tell him a tidbit of what she was working on in her head. "Maybe today is the day Phuong-Li will encounter her old UncleMinh in the market," she would say. (Writing a serial novel was as much an adventure as reading one, she had found. She turned in her installments daily or weekly without much revision or forethought, and the pieces were published immediately, taken out of her hands, cemented in ink that quickly. It made plot seem to her a live, unpredictable factor she was stumbling blindly after, trying to keep up with it.) Thien would respond appropriately, because he had been following along; all the names of persons his mother spoke of he accepted in the same way, whether they were fictional or real. "Will Uncle Minh punish her for how she ran away last week?" "But she knows Uncle Minh's secret, that he married his wife for her money, because she has met Uncle Minh's other daughter, remember? The one no one is supposed to know about." "Uncle Minh is a bad man," Thien might say, and often Tran was proud of his astute judgments. After breakfast each morning she walked her son to the end of the alley where it met an avenue. There he joined several other boys, and Tran watched as they raced across the avenue and through the gates to their school. Then she walked — smiling but not speaking to anyone she passed — back to the apartment. And once inside, she would sit down to write.Copyright © 2003 by Dao Strom. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
