The Refugees(13)
“What?” My mother’s brow furrowed. “If I can’t pronounce it, my customers won’t buy it. Now go stamp the prices on those cans.”
“They’re just going to ask for a lower price.” I was thirteen, beginning to be brave enough to say what I had suspected for a while, that my mother wasn’t always right. “Why do they haggle over everything? Why can’t they just pay the price that’s there?”
“Are you going to be the kind of person who always pays the asking price?” my mother demanded. “Or the kind who fights to find out what something’s really worth?”
I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that in the New Saigon, my chore every afternoon was to price the cans and packages. I was on my knees, rummaging for the stamp pad on the shelf behind my mother, when Mrs. Hoa introduced herself. Like my mother, she was in her late forties and dressed in monochrome, a white jacket, white pants, and white shoes, with bug-eyed sunglasses obscuring her face. As my mother bagged her purchases, Mrs. Hoa said, “I’m collecting funds for the fight against the Communists, my dear.” I knew the basics of our history as well as I knew the story of Adam and Eve: the Communists had marched from North Vietnam in 1975 to invade South Vietnam, driving us out, all the way across the Pacific to California. I had no memories of the war, but Mrs. Hoa said others had not forgotten. A guerrilla army of former South Vietnamese soldiers was training in the jungles of Thailand, preparing to launch a counterattack in unified Vietnam. The plan was to stir the unhappy people against their Communist rulers, incite a revolution, and resurrect the Republic of the South.
“Our men need our support,” Mrs. Hoa said. “And we need good citizens like yourself to contribute.”
My mother rubbed one ankle against the other, her -nylons scratching. A seam had opened behind her knee, but my mother would keep wearing the same hose until the run nipped at her heels. “I wish I could help, Mrs. Hoa, but times are hard,” my mother said. “Our customers are cutting back on everything, what with the recession and the gas prices. And our daughter’s in college. Her tuition is like a down payment on a house every year.”
“I struggle making ends meet, too.” Mrs. Hoa unclasped and clasped the silver latch on her purse. A thin gold band encircled her ring finger, and the red enamel on her nails was as polished and glossy as a new car’s paint. “But people talk. Did you hear about Mrs. Binh? People say she’s a Communist sympathizer, and all because she’s too cheap to give anything. There’s even talk of boycotting her store.”
My mother knew Mrs. Binh, owner of Les Amis Beauty Salon a few blocks farther west downtown, but changed the topic to the steamy June weather and the price of gold. Mrs. Hoa agreed about the temperature, smiling and displaying a formidable wall of teeth. She glanced at me before leaving my mother with this: “Think about it, dear. Taking back our homeland is a noble cause for which we should all be proud to fight.”
“Idiot,” my mother muttered after Mrs. Hoa was gone. As we drove home that evening along Tenth Street, my mother recounted the episode to my father, who had been too busy at his own register to overhear the conversation. When she mentioned the guerrillas, I imagined them to be unshaven, mosquito-bitten men with matted hair wearing ragged tiger-stripe fatigues; living on rainwater, wild boar, and aphids; practicing hand-to-hand combat skills by bayoneting jackfruit. From the backseat, I said, “How much are you giving Mrs. Hoa?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “It’s extortion.”
“But they’re fighting the Communists,” I said. Also known as Chinese and North Koreans, with Cubans and Sandinistas threatening infiltration and invasion from south of our border, as President Reagan explained on World News Tonight. “Shouldn’t we help them?”
“The war’s over.” My mother sounded tired. “There’s no fighting it again.”
I was outraged, for Mrs. Hoa’s appearance proved the war was not over, in that she had somehow followed us from the old Saigon to the new one. What was more, I had read Newsweek in the dentist’s office and knew we were in the midst of an epic battle against the evil empire of the Soviet Union. But if I was unhappy with my mother’s response, I was even more upset with my father’s.
“The war may be over,” he said, wiggling his little finger in his ear, “but paying a little hush money would make our lives a lot easier.”
My mother said nothing, merely drumming her fingers on the armrest. I knew she would have her way with my father, a bald man with the deliberate moves and patient eyes of a turtle. Late that night, hurrying from the kitchen to my room with a glass of water, I heard my mother working to persuade him behind their closed door. There was no time to eavesdrop. We had recently read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Ms. Korman’s class, and the fear of seeing someone undead in the dark hallway made me rush past their door, just as my mother said, “I’ve dealt with worse than her.”
Dread was stronger than curiosity. I shut my door and jumped into bed shivering, pushing aside my summer textbooks, which were wrapped in brown covers I had cut from a shopping bag and upon which I had scrawled “Math” and “American History.” Perhaps my mother was talking about the famine at the end of the Second World War, when she was nine. Last year, an evening television report on the Ethiopian famine had prompted my mother to mention this other famine while I plucked the gray hairs from her head. “Do you know a dozen children in my village starved to death?” she said, even though I obviously did not know. “Older people, too, sometimes right on the street. One day I found a girl I used to play with dead on her doorstep.” My mother lapsed into silence as she stared at a point on the wall above the television, and I did not say anything. It was the kind of story she told all the time, and in any case, I was too distracted to ask questions. She was paying me for every strand I found and I was intent on my search, each gray hair bringing me one nickel closer to the next issue of Captain America.