The Refugees(33)

“Couldn’t you find a better place, dear?” Michiko fanned herself with her sun hat. “You don’t even have an air conditioner.”

“This is better than what most people have. Even if people could afford this place, there’d be an entire family in here.”

“You’re not a native,” Carver said. “You’re an American.”

“That’s a problem I’m trying to correct.”

Recalling a lesson from the couples therapy Michiko had persuaded him to attend, Carver counted down from ten. Claire watched with her arms crossed, face as impassive as it was when he spanked her in her childhood, or shouted at her in the teenage years when she repeatedly crossed whatever line he’d drawn.

“Enough, you two,” Michiko said. “People are always a little cranky without their coffee, aren’t they?”

Claire’s apartment was situated above a café. Carver sipped black coffee on ice at their sidewalk table, squatting on a plastic stool and watching Michiko spend five dollars buying postcards and lighters from four barefoot children, dark as dust, who bounded up the moment they sat down. After their sales, the quartet retreated a few feet and stood with their backs to a row of parked motorbikes, giggling and staring.

“Haven’t they seen tourists before?” Carver said.

“Not like us.” Claire unsealed a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “We’re a mixed bag.”

“They don’t know what to make of us?” Michiko said.

“I’m used to it, but you’re not.”

“Try being a Japanese wife at a Michigan air base in 1973.”

“Touché,” Claire said.

“Try being a black man in Japan,” Carver said. “Or Thailand.”

“But you could always go home,” Claire said. “There was always a place for you somewhere. But there’s never been a place for me.”

She said it matter-of-factly, without any of the melodrama of her adolescence, when she would come home from school sobbing at a slight from a peer or a stranger, some variation along the line of What are you? Her tears agonized Carver, making him feel guilty for delivering her into a world determined to put everybody in her proper place. He wanted to find the culprit who had hurt his daughter and beat some sense into the kid’s head, but he restrained himself, as he had whenever he encountered the look in people’s eyes that said What are you doing here? In the one-room library of the small town five miles down the road from his hamlet; at Penn State, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship; in flight school at Randolph Air Force Base; in an airman’s uniform; in his B-52 and later his Boeing airliner, he was never where he was supposed to be. He had survived by focusing on his goal, ascending ever higher, refusing to see the sneers and doubt in his peripheral vision.

But now retired, limping out of his sixties, he no longer knew what his goal should be. He envied Claire her sense of mission, teaching English to people as poor as the dirt farmers and sharecroppers of his childhood, their skin as brown and cracked as the soil they tilled, the desiccated earth of summer’s oppressive months. She exhibited a confidence that pleased him as he watched her hail a taxi, give directions in Vietnamese to the English school, and greet the students clustered in the courtyard under the shade of flame trees. When Claire gestured at Carver and Michiko and said something in the local language, the students greeted them in pitch-perfect English. “Hello!” “How are you!” “Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Carver!” Carver smiled at them and waved back. Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did.

A few doors down the colonnade from the courtyard was Claire’s classroom, her wooden desk confronting several rows of short tables and benches. Acne scars of white plaster were visible, the yellow paint of the walls having peeled away in a multitude of places. On the blackboard behind the desk, someone—it must have been Claire herself—had written “The Passive Voice” in big, bold letters. Underneath was written “my bicycle was stolen” and “mistakes were made.”

“How many students do you have, dear?” Michiko said.

“Four classes of thirty each.”

“That’s too much,” Carver said. “You’re not paid enough to do that.”

“They really want to learn. And I really want to teach.”

“So you’ve been here two years.” Carver toed a slab of tile flaking loose from the floor. “How much longer are you planning to stay?”

“Indefinitely.”

“What do you mean, indefinitely?”

“I like it here, Dad.”

“You like it here,” Carver said. “Look at this place.”

Claire deliberately swept her gaze over her classroom. “I’m looking.”

“What your father means is that we want you back home because we love you.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I am home, Mom. It sounds strange, I don’t know how to put it, but I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be. I have a Vietnamese soul.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Carver shouted.

“It’s not stupid,” Claire hissed. “Don’t say that. You always say that.”