THE “DIARY” OR ‘MEMOIR’ FORM OF CREATIVE FICTION
A SHORT STORY:
OF CULTURE, BOND AND BONDAGE: THE 51-49% SPLIT
(MEMOIR OF THE VIETNAMESE WOMAN WHO BLINDLY LOVES)
BY Ng.Uye^n Nicole Dương, copyright 2009
(This is part of the unfinished memoir of an educated Vietnamese woman who had married an American male, her career counterpart in the U.S., with whom she had no children.)
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I once had the best home-made Vietnamese crepe (called banh xeo in the Vietnamese southern dialect) at an urban public housing complex. The mother of a young Vietnamese college student invited me to their home. They had lived in the public housing complex for 10 years. She worked at a restaurant to support her son in college.
In that small kitchen, she stood and cooked. She was about 5 years older than I. Very petite and youthful-looking, like most Vietnamese women.
Her son had looked me up at the University where I taught. Then he came in to see me. He was not one of my students, but he offered to help me with my research about Vietnam, free of charge. He spoke accented English, and told me he wanted to become a medical doctor only to do research and to help his people. Intelligent and ambitious, he said he was born post-1975. Under communist Vietnam, he never went to school. He fished instead, and became a "boat person" at the age of 12. In America, he relied on the Vietnamese Catholic Church to learn a sense of community, and the priests taught him how to read and write Vietnamese. American public education took care of his English.
(For my memoir, I have to skip description of the delicious Vietnamese banh xeo.)
I left their house with a full container of banh xeo to go, and a bag of books. The young man had collected all kinds of Vietnamese books for me, all the books that I already read and knew pre -1975, like the whole collection of Tu Luc Van Doan (Vietnam’s first Independent Pen Club). The young man did not know that I had read all of those books pre-1975. He thought I was raised in America.
Something scared me about this young man.
He told me some Vietnamese man in California who allegedly headed a movement to free Vietnam had returned to Vietnam, had been arrested, and was awaiting sentencing as a terrorist. This was the young man’s hero. His mother believed that this Vietnamese Californian was leading a respectable resistance movement that would eventually overthrow the government of Vietnam, and we would all return home. As Catholic, the mother was hardcore anti-communist. They would send their minimum wage earnings to this "resistance" movement.
(Of course I know all this, the “resistance movement” business, simply because I have listened to first-generation Vietnamese talks, and have been sent their video’ed debates via the internet. For this memoir, I am skipping all about this “resistance.”)
I had sat there eating banh xeo and listening to the single mother and her son, these very simple Vietnamese who did not share my course of life. I wondered whether my American husband and other outsiders could understand all this. Would there be a day that any mainstream American could comfortably walk into this public housing project, looking at the delicious Vietnamese banh xeo and understanding why I was sitting there, eating and thinking about a dark world called my exile culture, the kind of complexity that perhaps no historian could intuitively describe...
But there was also Cuba, together with President Kennedy's Bay of Pigs. Before that, there was the Korean War, and before that, Mao's Long March that chased Chang Kei Shek to Taiwan...
Somebody should understand...
***
My thought went back to three other Vietnamese men I had met, and could not forget.
I thought of the Vietnamese musician who had written a song, a beautiful piece set to Latin beat, Bossa Nova. He had written the piece in a motel in HoChiMinh City during his first trip back home from America, after the Boat People crisis, after Vietnam's open-door "renovation" policy in 1986. The lyrics spoke of how he was not sure whether the place, his Saigon – the land on which he walked – would still be dear to him, still embracing him in its memory: bond and bondage, the missing child, the returning spirit who went looking and found other ghosts…
I had met him at a Vietnamese party, where he sang his song to pre-recorded Bossa Nova accompaniment. His voice was weak yet soulful. The lyrics carried the soul.
I never forgot the song. The song became the man.
***
There was another Vietnamese man whom I met during my last trip back to Vietnam, a guided tour. He was a fellow traveller. This Vietnamese man, in his 40s but looking 30-ish, told me how he had escaped – sleeping in front of some quay, some dock, waiting for the boat to come. When it came, the boat Evaded the darkness; yet it also INvaded the darkness, because after long days and nights of desperate waiting, he knew darkness as his friend; it enveloped him in its intimacy.
He couldn't let go of the darkness, so when the boat came with its silhouette and sound of rescue, the boat also became the violator of the man's safety blanket. The boat broke his intimate darkness and blinded him with lights.
Where did he end up?
He was stranded in Europe, finally settling in Norway, of all places…So the Vietnamese had spread themselves from Southeast Asia all the way to the ice land of the North Sea!
(For the memoir, I am cutting short his tale.)
The tour was his home-coming.
During the tour, not knowing how old he was and judging him by his young and timid manners, I addressed him the same way I addressed my students. I called myself "Co^" (auntie or professor) and I addressed him as "Em" (younger brother). He did not object. Becoming a college professor must have subconsciously entitled me to think of the whole world as within my tutoring.
As I listened to the story of his escape, in the place where we sat that day – the steps of the rail station from Lao Cai to Sapa in North Vietnam (we were playing tourists to Sapa via Victoria Station), I felt very cold as though I were in Norway, or sleeping on the harsh ground of a ravaged Vietnam in transition, on the night he escaped on the flimsy boat that split his intimate darkness into HOME and EXILE. And blinded him.
***
And then, there was the Vietnamese waiter in a restaurant in the Asian part of town, who at times mishandled my bills, conveniently or unintentionally adding a few dollars for himself. He, too, told me of how he had to escape so that he did not have to join the Vietnamese communist army to fight the Chinese and the Cambodians (what was left of the Khmer Rouge) in 1978. Unlike the man who ended up in Norway, this friendly waiter ended up on one of the Spratlys islands. By then, they had run out of food and water. He was so thirsty he tried to drink the Pacific Ocean, only to throw up…The ocean, of course, could not be drunk! Sea water is never drinking water.
(To Memoir: how can my American husband and outsiders understand all this? Intellectually my husband will understand because he is intelligent. But emotionally, he cannot.)
***
For a long time, I kept thinking about these four Vietnamese men: the college student who believed in a California-based Vietnamese anti-communist resistance, the musician who could no longer find his Saigon so he wrote his song instead, the man who slept on the dock waiting for the rescue boat that paradoxically took away his safety blanket, and the waiter who had tried to drink the Pacific Ocean.
They have opened their lives to me, somewhat, at random, because our paths crossed. I kept comparing them to my American husband, who never went looking for the ghosts of Saigon, who never lay on a cold ground to wait for a fishing boat, who never drank the Pacific water, and who did not believe in any Vietnamese resistance movement.
When I thought of these four men, nostalgia overcame me, as though I became these men. Surely I am a teacher, but that does not mean there is a protective connection, as with my students. So where is the connection that made me feel so sad?
***
I couldn't understand why the nostalgia....
...until my aging parents needed me, and in taking care of them, I had to learn and relearn their lives. I began to understand their marital relationship: back in Vietnam, and then here in America. (To Memoir: I am skipping my parents' marriage.)
It was then, in loving and re-loving my parents, that I saw myself as the bridge between my parents and my younger siblings who understand my American husband better than understanding our own Vietnamese parents. The terror hit me when I realized that when I am gone, that bridge is gone.
That was how I began to understand me and my nostalgia. Call me simplistic, but it kind of went like this: In a country of 80 million like Vietnam, 51 percent has always been female, the majority, and the other 49 percent is male, the minority. The majority takes care of the minority. The 51 percent is all ME, the female. The other 49 percent? They are all my father, uncles, brothers, and all the sons I could have had.
What's Vietnam then? This 51-49 split.
What does it mean to be a Vietnamese woman who serves as the bridge between her parents and her siblings and their children, those who don't want or know such bridge?
As the bridge, I am the 51 percent bearing the other 49 percent’s pain, as my mother has borne my father's pain. With the 49 percent's sadness in me, I must have engulfed the entire culture into my heart.
(The Memoir has a gap here. But it goes on to say...)
This past year, I left my American husband (after 10 years of pondering over his prenuptial agreement, which I never signed….not yet, and he loved me enough to marry me without my signature on the document, but the understanding between us is as clear as contractual terms in print ).
After 10 years, we never began that official honeymoon in Paris where he would bring me to the Ritz, and then to Monet's garden, because the prenuptial sat between us always, and our respective careers also built the invisible wall between us. Those walls kept me in America, and off my husband went to Europe. So I called him my husband for 10 years while that paper was never signed and our separation became a way of life.
(To Memoir: I am skipping all the details about how I left my husband.)
After I left my husband, I decided, very consciously, that I would fall in love with a Vietnamese man, whose family members had died together with all that “resistance movement” from French Indochina to communist Vietnam. Some man who could take in him the 49 percent who had fought for the liberty of their people.
I decided to love this man before I met him. Very unlike my normal self, I performed no due diligence on his background, disposition, character, or motive. We didn't even need to date. I ignored any side of darkness in him because I was already blinded by...light! All I need was his Vietnamese name. And the light of the rescue boat!
So that was how I consciously decided on the form of my love for my parents and for the culture. It would become my love for this one man, the 49 percent loved by the 51 percent blinded by the light.
All sounding like a dream…Not just any dream, but a long incomprehensible nightmare that took into its darkness all of the 49 percent who were my father, uncles, brothers, and could-have-been sons. The nightmare left the other 51 percent blazed in the light of a rescue boat that split the darkness. So the other 51 percent became confused and ravaged in the blindness of light.
(The Memoir again has a gap, so we never know what happened. She goes on to end:).
And then I found out….
The Vietnamese man that I had decided to love, i.e., to whom I decided to transfer my love for my parents and their Vietnamese world, is nothing but the dream itself. In that dream, there is the blinding light that sweeps us back into the culture where we all become homeless and stateless, once more.
Where is the terror?
The resistance may be phony. The music may be phony. The rescue boat may be phony. Even the salt that remains on the tip of the tongue of someone who tries to drink the Pacific Ocean may also be phony.
The terror lies in the paradox:
To take on exile to find a new home sometimes is but a return to homelessness. Escaping makes the darkness of the wait become our best friend, our only friend. And although the rescue boat, signaling our paradise of America, has saved us, it has also forever taken away our emotional safety blanket.
Once a refugee, always a refugee. The refugee that lives in exile repeats the single day that has become his or her loss, over and over again. (Hollywood even made a movie about this paranormal experience.)
Bond has become bondage!
The terror is:
I have indeed become the 51 percent that's called "female" of the forever ravaged Vietnam.
Uyen Nicole Duong copyrighted December 2010, edited June 2017.
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