The author has indicated that the following is based on a true story.
1/
When I was six years old, my parents made a promise to a family friend, Mrs. Linh, a widow, that I would marry Kim, her daughter. She was two years my junior. Kim was the pride and joy of her grandfather, a very rich merchant in Hanoi. When the Geneva Accord was signed and Vietnam was divided into two zones, Mrs. Linh moved south and settled in Saigon, bringing along half the family’s fortune, but not her daughter. Kim stayed in Hanoi at the insistence of her grandfather, who expected that the family would be together again in two years when an election to reunite the two zones was scheduled to occur. My family also went south in 1954 along with a million other people who chose allegiance to the nationalist government in the southern part of Vietnam. The election never took place. Kim never saw her mother again.
I became sort of a surrogate for Kim in her mother’s life. She came to pick me up every Sunday in a light blue American car with seats softer and more spacious than my grandparents’ Hong Kong mattress. She took me to the best restaurants in Saigon, bought me a lot of presents, and later asked my father if she could send me to school in France. It was the tradition for students from affluent families to go abroad for their education . My father turned her down, saying he wanted to pay for his own son’s education.
2/
The woman named Kim called that night.
“Are you Mister Thach?” a female voice asked. She had an odd inflection that I’d noticed in people since I came to Hanoi. The accent was much heavier, flatter, unpleasant and hard to understand, especially on the phone when you couldn’t watch the speaker’s lips.
“Yes.”
“Mister Hung told me to give you a call. My name is Kim.”
Before I could acknowledge her with a greeting, Kim started to talk. She began with her staying with her grandfather in Hanoi, the mother she’d never seen again, how hard a life she’d had since her grandfather died in poverty after offering his entire fortune to the government in exchange for permission to live peacefully in his old age.
The more she talked, the more uneasy I became. The first part of her story checked out fine – I’d told Hung practically the same thing – but there was no way I could verify what she was telling me about her grandfather. Her grandfather…something stirred in my memory.
“…As I said,” she continued, “…My husband was a soldier. He lost both his legs in the war. And we have ten children to feed…”
I tuned out again. She sounded sincere enough but there was a rehearsed quality in her speech and she didn’t have to tell me how hard a life she’d had - not just thirty seconds after the first hello. And now she’d been talking for almost ten minutes, non-stop.
I remembered Ngoc-Anh’s warning of the prevalent scams in Vietnam and wondered if I was being sucked into one. I remembered that Ngoc-Anh had told me, when the subject of Kim came up, that she could be a fake. After all, I’d told Hung the whole story and if he was as devious as Ngoc-Anh thought he might be, as a scheme master, Hung could easily create a Kim, with an authentic biography, courtesy of Le Van Thach aka Pierre Nakasone, to take advantage of whatever I wanted to give her to repay her mother’s munificence.
I dug deeply in my memory to find some kind of clue that I would need to make sure that Kim was bona fide while she droned on.
“….I went to Saigon looking for my mother after 1975 because I was told by my grandfather that my mother had taken a lot of money from him when she went south in 1954…My grandfather said…”
Grandfather…Grandfather…Grandfather…
And then it came to me.
“Miss Kim, can I ask you a question?”
She stopped at midstream in another story of her difficult life in the north.
“Oh…of course.”
“What’s your grandfather’s name?”
There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line. When the woman – Kim – mentioned her grandfather for the umpteen times, something jogged my memory. A name – a familiar name – floated in and out of my mind. What was that name? Then it came to me. I suddenly had a vivid image of the rectangular, aluminum sign with the letters “Hung Xuat Nhap Cang” – Hung’s Import-Export - in red, hung over his storefront on Hang Dao Street in Hanoi. The silence seemed to stretch itself into infinity, and then I heard a dial tone. The woman had hung up. The scam almost worked.
The name of the grandfather, in an ironic twist, was the same as Hung’s, my fellow teacher, and the puppeteer who had created this woman in hope for a pay off from a scam.
I took a deep breath. I’d hoped against hope when I asked the question that the woman would be able to answer so I would have a chance to meet Aunt Linh’s daughter and repay her for her mother’s kindness. Now that Ngoc-Anh’s prophecy had been proven, I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or sad.
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