brought up in Hue and Saigon (former capital of South Vietnam). Uyen
received her B.S. in Journalism/ Communication from
Southern Illinois University, J.D. from University of Houston (Texas),
and LLM from Harvard Law School (Cambridge MA). She is believed to be
the first Vietnamese Judge in the United States (Serving in
Texas: Associate Municipal Judge, City of Houston, and Magistrate for
State of Texas; honoured by the American Bar Association at "Minority
Women in the Judiciary" conference -- NYC, 1992). Practicing law but she
sees herself primarily as a writer, and writes in two languages:
Vietnamese and English. Her pieces in Vietnamese appeared in numerous
literary magazines, her English's in SongVan Magazine, and Pacific Rim
Law & Policy Journal. Duong Nhu Nguyen's first book in Vietnamese, 'Mui huong que,' a
collection of short stories, was published by Van Nghe Publisher in
1999. Her short story "The young woman who practiced singing" won two
awards, one of which was the Stuart Miller Writing Award organised by
the District of Columbia Bar Association (1998). The short story "The Ghost
of Ha Tay" was a finalist selection for the Columbine Award of the
Moondance Film Festival 2001. Duong Nhu Nguyen also wrote articles and
critiques. Her article "Gender issues in Vietnam – The Vietnamese Woman:
Warrior and Poet" appeared in the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal,
University of Washington, College of Law, March 2001.
Publications:
* Mui huong que (short story collection. CA: Van Nghe Publisher, 1999)
* Gender issues In Vietnam – The Vietnamese Woman: Warrior and Poet
(Article, book length, University of Washington, College of Law: Pacific Rim Law &
Policy Journal March 2001).
* The woman who practiced singing (short story. Songvan Magazine, 1998)
* The Ghost of Ha Tay (short story. Wordbridge Magazine, 2002)
vietnamjournal.org]
The Ghost of Ha Tay
by Ng.Uyen Nicole Duong
(Dedicated to the soul of my aunt)
--"TELL ME ABOUT HER," HE SAID, ROLLING THE "R" OF THE LAST word, the
refined European accent alienating him from the chipped, nineteen
seventy-ish furniture of my incense-filled, run-down workshop in
mid-town Houston. I was pressing my elbows onto my humble veneer
desktop, hunching my shapeless five foot three body over it, when the
towering tall white man handed me the rumpled, stained name card that
spoke of the long journeys and hard trips so different from the first
class cabin of international airlines. I thought, instead, of slow,
sleepy trains and noisy, rusty buses crawling across Southeast Asia,
carrying inside them compartments and wooden benches where people and
chickens competed for the same narrow space, stopping along rest
stations where peddlers waved dusty white rice cakes in the haggard face
of tired passengers.
I glanced at the black bold type face that was supposed to identify my
unexpected visitor and found, instead, the name of a woman:
Jasmine Khai
Coudert Brothers
Paris. London. Milan. New York City.
I recognized the name of the international law firm, which brought me
back to my days at the University of Saigon in the early 70s, when I was
once famous enough to be blacklisted by the government as an anti-war
student, draft evader, and anti-government columnist. Back then, I had
heard of the French-founded, oldest law firm in America, which sent its
lawyers to Saigon to serve the needs of American businesses -- from the
international adoption of war orphans to the acquisition of supplies and
materials and the hiring of local labor for defense contractors.
I looked into the deep blue eyes underneath curly lashes and thought of
the Mediterranean sea I once dreamt of as a boy growing up in Vietnam.
The square angle of the jaw line spelled beauty on a man not more than
thirty five years of age, reminding me of all those French movie stars
who lived in Loire castles and symbolized my childhood fantasies about
travelling to old Europe. Those days, I had dreamt, too, of the gleaming
body of the Seine on one autumn day, when yellow and red leaves flew in
the air, dancing to the vibrant music of Berlioz.
"St. Exupery and His Little Prince, that is your type," I said. For a
moment, he frowned, perhaps genuinely surprised, before nodding his
curly blond head. I saw before me the ardent, innocent, and watery eyes
of the grown up version of the Little Prince, tall and lanky, already
aging and tired of life at 35, yet still looking for his rose. One
Jasmine Khai.
He had introduced himself to me as Jean Paul Lambert, formerly with
Agence France Presse. I prided myself on belonging to the same breed of
men – the journalistic type.
"You must know her," he said almost pleadingly. "She said she used to
live here and would return here."
He had not forgotten the primary purpose of his visit. He was a man
desperately looking for a woman. In a split second, all cultural
barriers collapsed, and I saw so distinctly the faces of all the
Vietnamese men who had come to me looking for girlfriends or mistresses
in the old country. They all looked alike, bearing in their soul and on
their face the despair of a lover.
I grabbed the old business card he had handed me with what was left of
my right hand, three banana fingers to be exact. The missing two fingers
had been donated to the American dream, I always bragged about memories
of the earlier days of my immigrant existence. Straight out of a refugee
camp, I ended up in Houston as a meat chopper for a slaughter house.
Occupational hazard led to my fond memory of the ambulance chaser
attorney – the first white man I knew in America, who advised me to give
up workers compensation in exchange for a lawsuit settlement that helped
me set up my workshop. My workshop was the price of the two missing fingers.
I was waiting for my visitor to inquire about the missing fingers, but
no question came my way. He stirred anxiously in his chair, oblivious to
my famous trademark – Uncle Ten's missing banana fingers, that was. He
was a lover all right, completely absorbed in the reminiscence of his woman.
"A lawyer?" I probed. "Avocat a la cour?" I added in French. "Coudert has
never had any office in Houston." I waited for a reaction. There was
none. I continued, "Maybe it's just a woman…."
"She isn't any woman," he wasted no time cutting me off, his beautiful
accented voice sounding rush and impatient. I took one more look at his
boyish face. Perhaps he wasn't just any man.
I had been in this workshop for twenty years and no white man had set
foot in my territory, let alone one that took me back to my own boyhood
dreams, typical of middle-aged Vietnamese men who loved and hated the
renaissance culture of Indochina"s colonists, just as they had embraced
and, at the same time, rejected the entrepreneurial spirit of America.
It was 1999 and the big boys of Texas who once occupied their high-rent
offices in uptown and downtown Houston had gradually moved into the
Vietnamese neighborhood mid-town, tearing down old buildings and putting
up stucco facades for overpriced condominiums and offices. They helped
change the face of Houston that way. Yet I had held steadfast to my own
little shop, refusing their offers to abandon the sanctuary that
land-marked my Vietnamese neighborhood. Outside my front gate, I put up
a pole with the South Vietnamese flag. On the window, I imprinted a
drawing of the ying and the yang, symbolic of my Taoist philosophy. I
put no sign or name plate on the unobtrusive wooden door, protected by
thick, black iron fences and the intercom system that forced my
unexpected visitors to announce their names before they could gain entry
to the square hole where I practiced my trade. And art.
I"d like to think of my home-made, one-man-show newsletter, and all that
came with it, as a genuine art. The art of reading my people and
creating that mystical connection to a former homeland. Mine was the one
and only Vietnamese publication that recounted the unusual stories of a
culture in exile, all those extraordinary tales no one could verify,
disprove, or refute. I once typed all my stories and corrected typos
with an ink pen, photocopied my original on an old, beat-up Xerox
machine, and distributed copies at Asian grocery stores all over town.
The format and appearance of my publication had improved through the
years, as I replaced the old IBM self-correcting typewriter of the 70"s
with a desktop computer connected to a laser printer typifying the late
90s. I also purchased a better Xerox machine. The content of my
newsletter, though, had maintained its essential characteristics. There
were Vietnamese who thought of my work as gossipy trash. Others regarded
it with awe, calling it the borderline between science and spirituality.
My fans were always conscious of my name -- I was the famous, infamous
Uncle Ten, Cau Muoi, former journalist in the old country, self-made
entrepreneur, one- man publishing house, Houston"s only Vietnamese
psychic, private eye, and Jack of all trades. All Vietnamese businesses
in Houston, regardless of size and type, had been my advertisers at one
time, supporting my leisurely lifestyle and the growth of my one-man
newsletter – the Vietnamese appetite for the bizarre and misfit. The
publication was almost as old as the history of Vietnamese resettlement
in Houston, Texas, since the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975.
Uncle Ten"s workshop could mean different things to Vietnamese, but it
had never been the visiting place for a white man. Until this day.
"Burn an incense stick," my grown-up Little Prince urged. Obviously he
had heard of my routine. He had done his homework.
So I burned my incense stick, and prepared myself for meditation.
--"WATER, PLENTY OF WATER, CHRYSTAL CLEAR, I CAN SEE THE bottom of a
stream, all those smooth pebbles and white gravel lying silently,
witnessing, " I said, squinting. All blinds had been closed. Sun ray had
no place in my hours of meditation. In the film of incense smoke, the
white man"s face had lost its boyish grin. The gravity of his expression
confirmed I was on the right path.
I went on to describe the epitome of a perfect Asian woman. Waist small
enough to fit in some white man"s stretch of a hand. Eyes wetted with
self-sacrificing tears and almond-shaped, like boats that carried
midnight dreams. Mouth too demure to become nagger of criticism or
complaints. A leaf-like stature willowy in the wind but stoic enough to
take the abuse of man and fate. I was describing my own dream version of
Madame Butterfly.
--"Orchid. Mauve pink is the color of lips and flesh," I blurted out,
and my visitor"s face became whiter than a sheet.
--"Blueberry fields," I added, and watched him close his eyes. I told
him what happened when mauve turned violet, and rose lips and flesh
turned purple. They all blended in with blueberry fields. I might have
seen a tear dropping from the lash curtains covering the blue eyes of an
emotional man. If his eyes were the sky, it had turned stormy at the
sound of my words. All due to the deep, purplish color of blueberry fields.
--"So you know her," he said. I deliberately stayed quiet, neither
refuting nor affirming. I was Uncle Ten, man of cosmos. I was supposed
to know everything. That was understood.
When the lash curtains unveiled and he opened his large blue eyes to
stare at me again, I saw the turmoiled emotions of memory relived, and
knew it would be his turn to speak.
--"She held the key to my room," he said. "And that was how we met. In
Hanoi"s Metropole Hotel. Nineteen ninety four, the year the U.S. lifted
its trade embargo against Vietnam."
"IT WAS MY FIRST TRIP TO INDOCHINA AND I FOUND IT TO BE A strange land.
My daily thoughts and images were registered in my mind like an express
train traversing a stormy night, cutting through thunder and rain. Even
the plush, yet somber furniture of the newly renovated Metropole had
that flashback effect on my mind -- I felt constantly in a dream,
especially at around 10 o"clock at night, when I floated through the
hotel lobby toward the music bar. There I would review my notes for the
day over a glass of after-dinner liquor, widely awake as an observer,
yet dream-like as a participant.
"I had never been able to rationalize, dissect, or understand that
dream-like state.
"The dream-like state stayed with me even in broad daylight when I
rushed through the small alleys of sleepy Hanoi, in and out of rundown
government buildings and villas where Ho Chi Minh portrait smiled his
paternal smile upon his socialist-bureaucrat descendants. It was Uncle
Ho"s same signature smile, in war and in peace.
"The dream-like state persisted when, at sunset, I ran along Hanoi"s
misty, pacifying lakes and rustic temples, capturing into my pupils the
vestige of France in what was left of old Indochina. You see, I was born
in Paris, in 1965, son of an aging father who married late and had spent
time in Indochina. The colony to me was once a set of black and white
photographs, which turned into life only after I began my international
assignment with Agence France Presse, all happening at a time when
France had just returned to her favorite colony by buying and renovating
what she once owned almost a hundred years ago: the landmark Metropole
Hotel in central Hanoi.
"I made my home in the Metropole and learned my routine quickly,
accepting my hypnotic, dream-like state as part of what Indochina had
instilled in me those days.
"Every Wednesday night, the music bar of the Metropole had a special
quartet that featured the piano, the flute, the violin, and the cello in
an array of popular classical and modern pieces. The quartet played
everything from Pachebell"s Cannon in D to Le Docteur Zivago. The young,
skinny classical musicians of Vietnam who became Metropole lounge
performers impressed me with the way they held their instruments against
their slender frame, much more profoundly than with the sound they made.
The poignant dignity they portrayed could only be matched by nostalgic
Indochina herself.
"One such Wednesday night became memorable, when I looked up from my
notes and found a young woman singing with the quartet. She looked so
out of place, dressed in Western clothes – a long, black, clinging knit
dress and matching cardigan. She was not exceptionally beautiful,
especially in a country full of beautiful and slender women moving like
butterflies in their graceful, body-fitting ao dai. I didn"t find them
particularly attractive. Too fragile and naïve, like the young limbs of
children or vases that could easily break. I didn"t want to handle
anything with that much care, especially in my constant dream-like state.
"It was the woman"s long black dress and penetrating eyes that defined
her. The rest of her, except for the black dress, black eyes and flowing
hair, seemed almost transparent in my blood shot eyes at eleven o"clock
at night amid the Cuban cigar smoke of the travellers who congregated at
the landmark Metropole. She could be either twenty six or thirty nine,
the bearer of those dark eyes looking down my soul, yet leaving no
memorable first impression. Even her voice, clear and vulnerable, sort
of like the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, filled my ears one second and
then dissolved the next, leaving the vibrato almost surreal. She was
singing in Vietnamese. In a song, the language sounded less
monosyllabic, less clipping, more melodious and pleasant. A local singer
she was supposed to be, but somehow she looked and acted foreign and out
of place.
"Having gulped down my whisky that night, I was ready to go back to my
room when she caught my eyes. After she ended her song, I picked up my
key from the table. Fate crept in and I dropped my key. I looked around
my chair. I couldn't find the key.
"Is this what you are looking for, Monsieur?"
"I heard the question asked in perfect Parisian French.
"I looked up and found a pair of black patent leather sandals, on a pair
of feet the size of my palm, with seductively painted red toe nails.
Above them was the hem of a black dress. I was stooping on to the
carpeted floor, and she was standing in front of me, too close for
comfort, the Vietnamese singer, a figure in a long black dress with
flowing hair. She was holding the key to my room.
"You see, I might have been constantly in my dream-like state, but
somehow the colors, images, lines, and angles of what I saw that night
remained perfectly real, frozen in memory. They formed the moment we met.
"MY MIND THOSE DAYS WAS LIKE THAT TRAIN PASSING THROUGH the night with
its rhythmic motion, amidst thunder flashing against a distorted,
blackened horizon. She was the only real thing in that horizon of dream.
We used to meet every Wednesday night after her performance. She showed
me her American passport and gave me the business card you now hold in
your hand. She told me she was a lawyer travelling from Houston, Texas,
to Hanoi, Vietnam to re-establish an office for Coudert Brothers after
its nineteen-year absence from the country. What was a Coudert lawyer
doing in the Metropole Hotel, singing Vietnamese music? I once asked,
and she answered with a question. What was a young French newsman doing
in a music bar at eleven o"clock at night listening to Vietnamese love
songs he could not understand? Le cauchemar, mon pere, et L'Indochine,
I could have said, but of course she had no business knowing about my
nightmare or my father, and I had no business telling. Agence France
Presse and Coudert Brothers brought us together, she said, and I readily
agreed. We were two adults from two separate places, intertwined by
history, roaming an exotic place for a past of which we knew nothing,
she added. Again, I readily agreed.
"It was such an odd feeling to have this stranger, a Vietnamese woman
you just met, hold the key to your room, open it, slip in, and stretch
herself down on your bed. From that point on, she became the steam from
an herbal tea pot, colorless yet distinctive. She permeated into the
air, filling my space, my soul, unable to break, neither yielding nor
conquering, never letting go. Making love to her was like descending
into myself, without seeing a path. I returned to the center of me, in a
web I could not understand.
"Naturally, there came a time when Wednesday nights in the Metropole
became the core of my existence in Hanoi, and being without her meant
being engulfed in a total void. My former life in Paris seemed so far
away it existed no more. In that state of mind, I discovered one night
how she had always held more than just the key to my hotel room.
"I followed her once from the Metropole hotel out to the cemented alleys
of Hanoi. We walked under Hanoi"s moonlight, with her running ahead of
me, laughing backward, in the same clear voice that sang those
incomprehensible songs during our Wednesday night routines.
"Move on, Jean Paul," she said, and I moved toward the trace of
moonlight that shone onto her heels. We walked on, with me following
her, as though the whole night had just begun.
"We stopped in front of a tall, red brick wall, mossy and dull like the
complacent witness of the hundred years that manifested themselves in
the ancient quarters of Hanoi. I looked up and realized we were in front
of some old, hideous building, the familiar French architecture no
longer carrying its charm. She leaned her black clad body against the
damp wall and whispered to me. "Aren't we home, Jean Paul?"
"Your soul must have wandered around here a hundred years ago," she
said, laughing still.
"Perhaps," I joined her in her folly. Everything was possible in the
dream-like state of Indochina.
"Why are we here, Jasmine?" I pressed her against the wall and asked in
between a kiss.
--"Hoa Lo," she said. "The name means a burning fire stove," she
whispered into my ears. She let me know we were standing against the
back wall of the infamous Hanoi prison, built by the French to hold
Vietnamese patriots. Later on it became the hell on earth for American
pilots.
"I looked down her oval face and found in the streak of moonlight a pair
of inviting lips, puffy in the shade of mauve pinkish orchid. I
attempted to wipe the lipstick off with my thumb, but there was no
lipstick to smear. She said mauve pink was the lip color of Vietnamese
girls. During French colonialism, they were all captured and sent to Hoa
Lo, where their mauve lips turned purple. "Into the color of blueberry
fields," she said.
"I looked into the streak of moonlight on her face again and thought
those orchid lips of hers, too, had indeed turned bluish lavender.
"One moment passed, and the next thing I saw was her silhouette running
down the blackened alley, her shiny heels stepping skillfully around
little ponds of rainwater accumulating on the alley, the hem of her
dress dancing above them. I followed her again and we crossed many more
alleys and dark, paved streets, before we reached the front gate of an
old brick house. She held my hand and led me in, telling me we were in
the house where her folks once lived. "Almost a hundred years ago," she
said. She kept on talking. No longer in her flawless English or French,
but in the clipping tonal sounds of her native tongue. She was pouring
out her soul.
"We slipped U.S. dollar bills to the children and adults with scrupulous
eyes so that they would go away, leaving us alone in the dark, humid
house where I watched her squat nude in the courtyard, under a stream of
August moon. In the mossy courtyard less than ten feet wide, near sewage
and trash, she scooped rainwater from a slippery clay container with an
old powder milk tin can and poured it on her naked self. If I had been
an artist, I would have painted the sight of her nudity, but I was no
artist, and all I could do was to carry her wet self inside the house,
to the bamboo bed under an opaque mosquito net, tugged behind an old
curtain made out of some cheap flowery cotton fabric. I held my breath
and toughened my muscles to the point of stillness. I could smell my own
sweat and the unsanitary smell of urban poverty, and the heat seemed
eternal in that small space, and every drop of water residue on her skin
became a soothing source of breeze to take me away from the filthy,
stuffy deep alleys of poor Hanoi. Onto a different world. That of raw
sensual love. I travelled in moments too precious to be locked up in
drawers of memories destined to fade into old age. "There was a young
girl who used to live here," she said as I dozed off. "They caught her
father and sent him to Hoa Lo and he died there. The mother took the
girl to her village, far away from here, but there was no hiding from
fate, and something happened to the girl later, toward the end of the
war," her words dimmed away.
"In my usual dream-like state, my body reached out for hers and I seized
her lips when they turned from mauve to lavender. I was making my way
through the damp swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia and all of the
things they did to the Vietnamese patriots and American pilots held in
Hoa Lo were being done to me. Every nerve ending in me rose and fell and
I submerged in the pain-pleasure-pain cycle that numbed my brain. Love"s
tender secret, share it with me, I kept hearing her voice. The
pain-pleasure cycle stopped only after I turned my sweated body to the
first beam of sunlight that pierced through my eyelids. I regained
consciousness that way, along with the beckoning of the day. "She was
standing nude in front of the only window in that old house, singing to
herself. Voi que sapete che cosa e amor. Donne vedete s"io l"ho
nelcor…You have the answer, you hold the key. Love"s tender secret,
share it with me. Lady, I beg you, share it with me. The sun had not
fully emerged outside and her silhouette edged against the sheer curtain
made out of some cheap white lace that had turned yellow. But in the
gray area where she stood in the beginning of dawn, the lace appeared
virginal. Quietly, I watched her breathe: the curve of her waist and the
smallness of her back heaving up and down, resembling the fluid shadow
of a brown cello edging against a misty bridal veil.
"From the bed, I watched her turn and look at me in the middle of her
song, her pointed breasts protruding, her eyes full of tears. The sun
was gradually rising behind her, behind all that cello silhouette edging
against lacy veil. Lady I beg you share it with me…
""--So what"s your secret, Jasmine?" I yearned and yearned.
""--You will know in time," she said.
"Up until then, you see, I had only seen her at night. My heart somehow
sank into despair as I watched the first sun ray sweep through her dim
and pale face. Somehow I knew I would be bound to that face. I must have
fallen in love.
--"Why are you here, Jean Paul?" the tearful almond eyes asked of me.
"She moved slowly toward me and fell onto my chest and my arms held her
and I cried my hot tears into the cooling mass of her hair. I cried into
the darkness that imprisoned me. Lady I beg you, share it with me, her
song still echoing, and I went on to tell her my secret about the old
Frenchman who died in the asylum outside Paris. During the last hours of
his life, the old man was still speaking incessantly of the blueberry
fields, where he had raised the rifle and aimed at the smooth forehead
in between a pair of dark girlish eyes looking up at him in terror. The
bloody naked body jerked backward once, the skull cracked, and then the
pair of eyes, wide-opened, bewildered, despaired and horrified,
submerged underneath all that crystal clear water. At some point, the
open pink mouth and warm mauve pinkish flesh would turn purplish. Into
the color of the blueberry fields.
I might have stopped telling. But the nightmare never ended.
"WEEKS WENT BY. MY LIFE MOVED ON AND I RETURNED TO MY Hanoi routine with
wire service assignments and my transient newsman"s existence at the
Metropole Hotel, except that she no longer came to me on Wednesday
nights. The quartet was still playing in the music bar, but she was
gone. I waited and waited for any kind of news.
"The news finally came when a handwritten note was delivered to my room
one day. I was to hire a car and a chauffeur and she would meet me for a
day trip to the mountainous areas west of Hanoi. Her job in Vietnam was
finished and she would soon be returning to Houston, Texas. The
handwritten note contained all of the necessary instructions for my
driver to follow.
"We must have a proper farewell away from Hanoi," the last line of the
note said.
"The car passed through the red dirt hills near the dam Yen Phu
overlooking the Red River, onto the bridge of Phung Thuong, and stopped
at the green foothills of the Tan Vien range, where the dirt road
leading to the foothills could no longer accommodate four-wheeled
transport. She was standing by the dirt road waiting for me, dressed in
black satin pantaloons and a white silk blouse like a proper Vietnamese
girl of the olden days. A black silky shawl covered half of her face and
draped over her shoulders. I could hardly see the flow of her hair on
such a hard, windy day.
"It was the second time I saw her in broad daylight.
"I got off the car and she held my hand and led me into the hilly range
ahead of me, almost reddish against the mid-afternoon sun. She told me
we were in the province of Ha Tay, land of freedom fighters and poets.
An ox- pulled cart sluggishly passed by us, stirring up the red dirt,
competing hopelessly with curious moped drivers who bumped their
vehicles up and down the road, their head turning backward for a glimpse
of us as an odd couple – a tall blond Westerner and a Vietnamese girl
dressed in a traditional countryside outfit. The villages and hamlets of
north Vietnam spread themselves before my inquisitive eyes and I
followed, again, the dancing heels of my companion. I moved in a trance
in the foreign landscape of wet farm land, dotted with little,
brown-faced people who bent their skinny back over green rice paddies.
"We kept moving until I heard the sound of a waterfall.
"--There, Jean Paul," she pointed, pulling her scarf down to show me her
face.
"I looked at the oval face accented by those mauve colored lips I had
come to love, just in time to see the pair of dark eyebrows raising in a
mysterious expression of challenge. I followed the tip of her finger
toward the horizon afar to catch sight of the body of water, sapphire
clear underneath the reddish sun. It was just a pond or a stream, not a
waterfall after all, although the melody of cascading water passing
through rocks jingled in the air, mixed with the pleasant chirping
sounds of singing birds. Beyond the sparkling water was a purplish, deep
blue forest, standing against a pale blue horizon crisscrossed with
darting arrows of reddish light streams.
"It was a breathtaking sight.
"A perfect place reserved for love. Hers and mine, I thought.
"She was much shorter than I and, tilting on her toes, she reached for
my face, her arms wrapping around my neck. The mauve orchid lips quickly
touched mine. Vaguely I tasted the tangy sweetness of blueberries.
--"Watch, Jean Paul, the blueberry fields. Vietnamese blueberries. The
Sim Tim," her sweet voice engulfed my ears.
"She let go of me and walked toward the purplish blue of the horizon.
"--Jasmine," I called her name. She stopped and turned and the sweet
voice continued along with the chirping birds:
--"The girl"s name was Khai, Jean Paul. She was washing clothes by the
stream. Near the blueberry fields."
"I moved. She let go of the scarf. It flew toward me. Backward, against
the wind. I could hear her words in all that thin air.
"--Three French legionnaires found her. They tore up her clothes and
held down her limbs. They took turns, Jean Paul."
"The scarf hit my face. Gently, so gently. Yet, I bent down in pain.
"--They could just have left her there. But one Frenchman raised the rifle."
"The scarf was covering up my eyes and I could no longer see her face. I
heard her words still.
--"Blood spurted from her forehead and she fell backward. Into the
stream. The water was once so clear before it turned brutally red. Her
lips, bruised and cut, were still the shade of mauve pink."
--"No, Jasmine," I cried out in vain. Through the scarf, I saw her face.
It was growing larger and larger, out of proportion. From the corner of
my eyes, her lips looked purplish blue.
--"The villager found her two days later, floating down the stream,
toward the blueberry fields. Her lips had turned purple, Jean Paul."
"I scraped the scarf off my face and let it fly. I looked into the
horizon of blueberry fields and no longer saw her face.
"--Farewell, Jean Paul," I heard her voice for the last time.
"Sunset was approaching. Darkness gradually descended upon the Tan Vien
foothills, and I found myself alone in the wilderness, facing all those
blueberries.
She was no where to be found.
There was no trace of her, except for that flying scarf.
"I SPENT THE NEXT THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE TRAVELLING ALL over Vietnam
looking for the owner of that scarf. I longed for the familiar shade of
orchid pink in lips that turned lavender and then purplish at nighttime.
"I never found her. Nor those vivid colors and shapes that haunted my
memory since then.
"I headed next toward the United States. Orange County, California and
then Houston, Texas, land of the Vietnamese immigrants."
"FIND HER FOR ME AT ANY RATE, S"IL VOUS PLAIT," MY GROWN-UP version of
The Little Prince said to me, his blue eyes searching urgently for a
promise.
I was Uncle Ten, man of cosmos. I should have made such a promise. But I
didn"t.
He left my workshop with a stint of hope, still, shown in the handshake
and the turn of the blond head at the door. The blue eyes were still
pleading for a common belief.
Left alone in my workshop, I sighed and felt genuinely sad. I should
have told him the blueberry fields were a common Vietnamese metaphor for
love in wartime. All educated Vietnamese raised in the aftermath of
French colonialism knew this. Perhaps my grown-up Little Prince knew
this. Perhaps he didn"t. Blueberry fields existed only in a poem,
written by a Vietnamese romanticist during his participation in the
hellish battle of Dien Bien Phu. The poet-warrior dedicated his poem,
Blueberry Fields, to a beautiful young woman who had died during the
Indochinese war.
Growing up in Vietnam, I had never seen blueberry fields. It was just
the name of a romantic poem. I mentioned that name at the beginning of
my meeting with Jean Paul, purely out of gut instinct and my own notion
of fantasy.
After all, I was Uncle Ten, Houston's only man of cosmos.
###
POSTSCRIPT:
I sighed. A breath drawn from eternity. No one should be surprised with that type of breath, because, after all, I am Uncle Ten, man of cosmos.
The last stream of sunlight had disappeared from the window pane, yet I was still sitting at the chipped table, with my elbows pressing down onto its all-purpose chipped top. I was still dreaming about those horizon-less blueberry fields.
I would soon have to go home, the home that had the fingerprints of the white lawyer who had ordained my two crushed fingers, such a token of flesh and bones offered to my American dream.
On the entrance to my home, that white male had faithfully carried out my instructions: to crave onto concrete my authentic Vietnamese full name and those numbers...Alas, those numbers and letters inherited from the old priest Alexandre de Rhodes, who handed down to us the Roman alphabet. All those numbers and letters meant so little to the United States of America, yet were so significant to my parents who had been resting in peace, waiting for me, in all those rice fields and red soil and whatever else that made up our attachment to the motherland.
Looking at the carved concrete, deciphering those letters and numbers, no one would know that the abode owner was me, Uncle Ten, all-purpose newsman, top prophet for the Vietnamese refugee community in Houston, Texas, the one and only character there was, back to ancient days.
After all, I would have to stand up, lock the office and traverse into the night.
Out there, Jean Paul Lambert and Jasmine Khai were waiting...
All three of us would be riding the wind...
THE END
WND C July 4 2019
Uyen Nicole Duong copyright 2000,2017, 2009
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