The Refugees(47)

“This is like Saigon in the old days.” Mr. Ly smiled fondly, gazing upon the restaurant’s velvet draperies and marble pillars. During the war, he had owned a shoe factory, a beach home in Vung Tau, a chauffeured Citro?n. Photographs from that time showed a dapper man with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. Now, so far as Phuong could tell, he wore his sadness and defeat in a paunch barely contained by the buttons of a shirt one size too small for him. “L’Amiral on Thai Lap Thanh. La Tour d’Ivoire on Tran Hung Dao. Paprika, with the best paella and sangria. I always used to go to those restaurants.”

“Not with me,” Mrs. Ly said.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” Mr. Ly asked Vivien. She refilled his glass from the bottle of Australian merlot and said, “I left it blank on my schedule. I always leave a day or two for surprises.”

“Can we go to Dam Sen?” Hanh asked. Phuc nodded vigorously.

“What’s that?” Vivien refilled her own glass.

“An amusement park,” Phuong said. She was drinking lemonade, as were her mother and brothers. “It’s not far from here.”

“I worked in one when I was sixteen,” Vivien said. “That was a crazy summer.”

“We can save Dam Sen for later,” Mr. Ly said. “Since you’ve seen where your sister works, let me take you on one of my tours tomorrow.”

“One hundred percent.” Vivien raised her glass, using the classic toast he had taught her.

He clinked his glass against hers, gazed upon his sons affectionately, and said, “Yours is a lucky generation.”

“I wouldn’t say we were so lucky,” Phuong said.

“You’ve never appreciated what you have.” Her father waved his hand over the meal and Phuong squeezed her glass, bracing to hear the stories of her parents one more time. “You want to talk about bad luck? After the Americans abandoned us and the Communists sent me to the labor camp, we ate roots and manioc to live. There were worms in the rice, which was mostly water. People caught dysentery or malaria or dengue fever like the common cold and just died. It was amazing we had blood left for the leeches.”

“It wasn’t so much better at home,” Mrs. Ly chimed in. “I sold everything to survive after the war. My sewing machine. The record player you gave me, and the records, too.”

“The dumbest part was the confessions.” Mr. Ly stared into his glass, as if all the lessons learned in the labor camp, once distilled, merely served to fill it. “Every week I had to come up with a different way to criticize myself for being a capitalist. I wrote enough pages for a whole autobiography, but every chapter said the same thing.”

Phuong sighed, but Vivien was listening intently, chin cupped in her hand. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know.” When their father looked up, Vivien said, “Why give your children with your other wife our names?”

This was the question Phuong had never asked, fearing the answer she always suspected, that she and her brothers were no more than regrets born into flesh. Vivien’s forthrightness, however, did not appear to surprise or daunt their father, who merely raised his glass and said, “If you hadn’t come back to see me, I would have understood. But I knew you would come back to see the one I named after you.”

Vivien glanced at Phuong, who maintained a stoic expression. After all, it wasn’t Vivien’s fault their father behaved the way he did, playing favorites and pitying himself. “So here I am,” Vivien said. She returned her father’s gaze and clinked her glass against his. “And here’s to us.”

“One hundred percent,” Mr. Ly said.

For all the years that Mr. Ly had worked as a tour guide, he had never asked Phuong to accompany him on one of his trips. Although she had never wanted to go, she realized the next morning on the tour bus that she would like to have been asked. Vivien did not seem to appreciate their -father’s special regard for her, or her fortune in even being a tourist on this day, the boys left behind at school and Phuong’s mother busy at the Ben Thanh market. Instead, Vivien -focused her attention on the crowded conditions of the aging bus, whispering complaints into Phuong’s ear about the long-haired, budget-minded backpackers who jammed the thinly cushioned seats and made their father’s company a success. Then, embraced by clammy weather once they stepped off the air-conditioned bus at Ben Dinh, Vivien could only mutter that this was not exactly her idea of fun.

“I don’t even like camping,” Vivien said as the sisters trailed behind the other tourists, winding their way through the eucalyptus trees and bamboo groves where the fabled tunnels of Cu Chi were preserved. “I’d rather be in a shopping mall or a museum, but even the museums don’t have air-conditioning here.”

“Father wants you to see him at work,” Phuong said patiently. “He’s good at what he does.”

“Don’t tell him I said anything, okay? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

“So we have a secret?” Phuong teased.

“Sisters have to have secrets,” Vivien said. “Oh my God. What is it? Thirty-four degrees?”

“This isn’t so bad. It’s not even that hot.”

“I’m being bitten. I can feel it. Look at my legs!”

Vivien’s shins and thighs were studded with the pale bumps of fresh bites and the red kernels of fermenting ones. For a pediatrician and seasoned traveler, Vivien had proved woefully incapable of caring for her body. While Phuong wore gloves extending to her upper arms and nylons underneath her jeans, her sister wore T-shirts that exposed her bra straps and shorts that were sometimes so brief they revealed the waistband and thong of her panties. Despite her bared skin, Vivien neglected to use mosquito repellent and complained whenever the weather was hot, which was, according to her, nearly every second of the day and night. Her sister’s vulnerability was alternately a source of annoyance and endearment to Phuong, rendering Vivien less intimidating and perhaps more deserving of the secret Phuong longed to entrust, what she had never told her family and what only Vivien could understand.