The Refugees(12)
“I just wanted to see how you two were doing,” Parrish said, loud and cheerful, as if he’d been out drinking.
“Just fine,” Liem said, eyeing the letter on the coffee table. “Nothing special.” He didn’t like speaking on the phone, where body language was no help in making himself under-stood, and he kept the conversation short. Parrish didn’t seem to mind, and said good night just as boisterously as he’d said hello.
Liem sat down on the couch and opened the letter carefully. When he unfolded the single sheet of onionskin paper, translucent in the light, he recognized once again his father’s script, awkward and loopy, as hard for him to decipher as it was for his father to write.
September 20, 1975
Dear son,
We got your airmail yesterday. Everyone’s so happy to know you’re alive and well. We’re all fine. This summer, your uncles and cousins were reeducated with the other enlisted puppet soldiers. The Party forgave their crimes. Your uncles were so grateful, they donated their houses to the revolution. Our lives are more joyful now that your uncles, your cousins, and their wives and children are living with us in our house. The cadres tell us that we will erase the past and rebuild our glorious country!
When you have time, send us the news from America. It must be more sinful even than Saigon, so remember what the cadres say. The revolutionary man must live a civil, healthy, correct life! We all think of you often. Your mother misses you, and sends you her love. So do I.
Your Father
After he read the letter a second time, he folded it, slid it back into its envelope, and let it lie inert on the coffee table. Restless, he stood up and walked over to the bay window overlooking the street and the sidewalks, empty this late in the evening. The light in the room had turned the window into a mirror, superimposing his likeness over the landscape outside. When he raised his hand, his reflection raised its hand, and when he touched his face, the reflection did the same, and when he traced the curve of his cheek and the line of his jaw, so, too, did the mirror image. Why, then, did he not recognize himself? And why did he see right through himself to the dark street outside?
Raindrops on the glass dappled the reflection of his face. He waited at the streaky window for several minutes until he saw a sign of life, two men striding quickly down the street, shoulders occasionally brushing and hands deep in the pockets of their jackets. Their heads, ducked down low against the drizzle, were bent toward each other at a slight angle as each listened to what the other was saying. At one time he would have thought the two men could only be friends. Now he saw they could easily be lovers.
As they passed under a streetlamp, one of them said something that made the other laugh, his head tilting back so that his unremarkable face was illuminated for a second. The man’s eyes turned to Liem at that instant, and Liem, realizing he was quite visible from the street, wondered what kind of figure he must have cut, bare-chested and arms akimbo, his hair slicked back. Suddenly the man raised his hand, as if to say hello. When his partner looked toward the window as well, Liem waved in return, and for a moment there were only the three of them, sharing a fleeting connection. Then the men passed by, and long after they had vanished into the shadows he was still standing with his hand pressed to the window, wondering if someone, behind blinds and curtains, might be watching.
efore Mrs. Hoa broke into our lives in the summer of 1983, nothing my mother did surprised me. Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth, beginning with how she rapped on my door every morning, at six, six fifteen, and six thirty, until at last I was awake. When I emerged from my bedroom, she was already dressed, invariably wearing a short-sleeved blouse and skirt of matching pastels. She owned seven such outfits, and if she had on fuchsia, I knew it was Monday. Before we departed, she switched off the lights, checked the burners, tugged on the black iron grills guarding our windows, always in that order, and then, in the car, ordered me to lock my door.
As my father steered the Oldsmobile and I sat in the back reading a comic book, my mother worked on her makeup. By the time we arrived at St. Patrick ten minutes later, she was finished, the flags of blush on her cheeks blending in with her foundation. Perfume was the last touch, a pump of the spray on either side of her neck. The dizzying scent of gardenias clung to me in Ms. Korman’s summer school classroom, where, for seven hours every day, I spoke only English. I liked school, even summer school. It was like being on vacation from home, and at three o’clock, I was always a little disappointed to walk the four blocks to the grocery store my parents owned, the New Saigon Market, where English was hardly ever spoken and Vietnamese was loud.
My mother and father rarely left their posts, the cash registers flanking the entrance of the New Saigon. Customers always crowded the market, one of the few places in San Jose where the Vietnamese could buy the staples and spices of home, jasmine rice and star anise, fish sauce and fire-engine-red chilies. People haggled endlessly with my mother over everything, beginning with the rock sugar, which I pretended was yellow kryptonite, and ending with the varieties of meat in the freezer, from pork chops and catfish with a glint of light in their eyes to shoestrings of chewy tripe and packets of chicken hearts, small and tender as button mushrooms.
“Can’t we just sell TV dinners?” I asked once. It was easy to say TV dinners in Vietnamese since the word for television was ti-vi, but there were no Vietnamese words for other things I wanted. “And what about bologna?”