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THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467) VOLUME 4 NUMBER 2 JUL 2002
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UYEN NICOLE DUONG The ghost of Ha Tay (Dedicated to the soul of my
aunt)
--“TELL ME ABOUT
HER,” HE SAID, ROLLING THE “R” OF THE LAST word, the refined European accent
alienating him from the chipped, nineteen seventy-ish furniture of my
incense-filled, run-down workshop in mid-town Houston. I was pressing my elbows onto my humble
veneer desktop, hunching my shapeless five foot three body over it, when the
towering tall white man handed me the rumpled, stained name card that spoke
of the long journeys and hard trips so different from the first class cabin
of international airlines. I thought,
instead, of slow, sleepy trains and noisy, rusty buses crawling across
Southeast Asia, carrying inside them compartments and wooden benches where
people and chickens competed for the same narrow space, stopping along rest
stations where peddlers waved dusty white rice cakes in the haggard face of
tired passengers. I glanced at the black bold type face that was supposed to identify my
unexpected visitor and found, instead,
the name of a woman: Jasmine Khai Coudert Brothers Paris. London. Milan. New York City. I recognized the name of the international law firm, which brought me
back to my days at the University of Saigon in the early 70s, when I was once
famous enough to be blacklisted by the government as an anti-war student,
draft evader, and anti-government columnist. Back then, I had heard of the
French-founded, oldest law firm in America, which sent its lawyers to Saigon
to serve the needs of American businesses -- from the international adoption
of war orphans to the acquisition of supplies and materials and the hiring of
local labor for defense contractors.
I looked into the deep blue eyes underneath curly lashes and thought
of the Mediterranean sea I once dreamt of as a boy growing up in
Vietnam. The square angle of the jaw
line spelled beauty on a man not more than thirty five years of age,
reminding me of all those French movie stars who lived in Loire castles and
symbolized my childhood fantasies about travelling to old Europe. Those days, I had dreamt, too, of the
gleaming body of the Seine on one autumn day, when yellow and red leaves flew
in the air, dancing to the vibrant music of Berlioz. “St. Exupery and His Little Prince, that is your type,” I said. For a moment, he frowned, perhaps genuinely
surprised, before nodding his curly blond head. I saw before me the ardent,
innocent, and watery eyes of the grown up version of the Little Prince, tall
and lanky, already aging and tired of life at 35, yet still looking for his
rose. One Jasmine Khai. He had introduced himself to me as Jean Paul Lambert, formerly with
Agence France Presse. I prided myself
on belonging to the same breed of men – the journalistic type. “You must know her,” he said almost pleadingly. “She said she used to
live here and would return here.” He had not forgotten the primary purpose of his visit. He was a man desperately looking for a
woman. In a split second, all cultural
barriers collapsed, and I saw so distinctly the faces of all the Vietnamese
men who had come to me looking for girlfriends or mistresses in the old
country. They all looked alike,
bearing in their soul and on their face the despair of a lover. I grabbed the old business card he had handed me with what was left of
my right hand, three banana fingers to be exact. The missing two fingers had been donated to
the American dream, I always bragged
about memories of the earlier days of my immigrant existence. Straight out of a refugee camp, I ended up
in Houston as a meat chopper for a slaughter house. Occupational hazard led
to my fond memory of the ambulance chaser attorney – the first white man I
knew in America, who advised me to give up workers compensation in exchange
for a lawsuit settlement that helped me set up my workshop. My workshop was the price of the two
missing fingers. I was waiting for my visitor to inquire about the missing fingers, but
no question came my way. He stirred
anxiously in his chair, oblivious to my famous trademark – Uncle Ten’s
missing banana fingers, that was. He
was a lover all right, completely absorbed in the reminiscence of his woman. “A lawyer?” I probed. “Avocat
de cours?” I added in French. “Coudert
has never had any office in Houston.”
I waited for a reaction. There
was none. I continued, “Maybe it’s
just a woman….” “She isn’t any woman,” he wasted no time cutting me off, his beautiful
accented voice sounding rush and impatient.
I took one more look at his boyish face. Perhaps he wasn’t just any man. I had been in this workshop for twenty years and no white man had set
foot in my territory, let alone one that took me back to my own boyhood
dreams, typical of middle-aged Vietnamese men who loved and hated the
renaissance culture of Indochina’s colonists, just as they had embraced and,
at the same time, rejected the entrepreneurial spirit of America. It was 1999
and the big boys of Texas who once occupied their high-rent offices in uptown
and downtown Houston had gradually moved into the Vietnamese neighborhood
mid-town, tearing down old buildings and putting up stucco facades for
overpriced condominiums and offices.
They helped change the face of Houston that way. Yet I had held steadfast to my own little
shop, refusing their offers to abandon the sanctuary that land-marked my
Vietnamese neighborhood. Outside my
front gate, I put up a pole with the South Vietnamese flag. On the window, I imprinted a drawing of the
ying and the yang, symbolic of my Taoist philosophy. I put no sign or name plate on the
unobtrusive wooden door, protected by thick, black iron fences and the
intercom system that forced my unexpected visitors to announce their names
before they could gain entry to the square hole where I practiced my
trade. And art. I’d like to think of my home-made,
one-man-show newsletter, and all that came with it, as a genuine art. The art
of reading my people and making that mystical connection to a former
homeland. Mine was the one and only
Vietnamese publication that recounted the unusual stories of a culture in
exile, all those extraordinary tales no one could verify, disprove, or
refute. I once typed all my stories
and corrected typos with an ink pen, photocopied my original on an old,
beat-up Xerox machine, and distributed copies at Asian grocery stores all
over town. The format and appearance of my publication had improved through
the years, as I replaced the old IBM self-correcting typewriter of the 70’s
with a desktop computer connected to a laser printer typifying the late 90s.
I also purchased a better Xerox machine. The content of my newsletter,
though, had maintained its essential characteristics. There were Vietnamese
who thought of my work as gossipy trash.
Others regarded it with awe, calling it the borderline between science
and spirituality. My fans were always
conscious of my name -- I was the
famous, infamous Uncle Ten, Cau Muoi, former journalist in the old country,
self-made entrepreneur, one-man publishing house, Houston’s only Vietnamese
psychic, private eye, and Jack of all trades.
All Vietnamese businesses in Houston, regardless of size and type, had
been my advertisers at one time, supporting my leisurely lifestyle and the
growth of my one-man newsletter – the Vietnamese appetite for the bizarre and
misfit. The publication was almost as old as the history of Vietnamese resettlement
in Houston, Texas, since the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975. Uncle Ten’s workshop could mean
different things to Vietnamese, but it had never been the visiting place for
a white man. Until this day. “Burn an incense stick,” my grown-up
Little Prince urged. Obviously he had
heard of my routine. He had done his
homework. So I burned my incense stick, and prepared
myself for meditation. --“WATER, PLENTY
OF WATER, CHRYSTAL CLEAR, I CAN SEE THE bottom of a stream, all those smooth pebbles and white gravel lying
silently, witnessing, “ I said, squinting. All blinds had been closed.
Sun ray had no place in my hours of meditation. In the film of incense
smoke, the white man’s face had lost its boyish grin. The gravity of his expression confirmed I
was on the right path. I went on to describe the epitome of a perfect Asian woman. Waist small enough to fit in some white
man’s stretch of a hand. Eyes wetted
with self-sacrificing tears and almond-shaped, like boats that carried midnight
dreams. Mouth too demure to become
nagger of criticism or complaints. A
leaf-like stature willowy in the wind but stoic enough to take the abuse of
man and fate. I was describing my own
dream version of Madame Butterfly. --“Orchid. Mauve pink is the color of lips and flesh,”
I blurted out, and my visitor’s face became whiter than a sheet. --“Blueberry fields,” I added, and
watched him close his eyes. I told him
what happened when mauve turned violet, and rose lips and flesh turned purple. They all blended in with blueberry
fields. I might have seen a tear
dropping from the lash curtains covering the blue eyes of an emotional man. If his eyes were the sky, it had turned
stormy at the sound of my words. All
due to the deep, purplish color of blueberry fields. --“So you know her,” he said. I deliberately stayed quiet, neither
refuting nor affirming. I was Uncle
Ten, man of cosmos. I was supposed to
know everything. That was
understood. When the lash curtains unveiled
and he opened his large blue eyes to stare at me again, I saw the turmoiled
emotions of memory relived, and knew it would be his turn to speak. --“She held the key
to my room,” he said. “And that was
how we met. In Hanoi’s Metropole
Hotel. Nineteen ninety four, the year the U.S. lifted its trade embargo
against Vietnam.” “IT WAS MY FIRST TRIP TO INDOCHINA AND I
FOUND IT TO BE A
strange land. My daily thoughts and
images were registered in my mind like an express train traversing a stormy night,
cutting through thunder and rain. Even the plush, yet somber furniture of the
newly renovated Metropole had that flashback effect on my mind -- I felt
constantly in a dream, especially at around 10 o’clock at night, when I
floated through the hotel lobby toward the music bar. There I would review my
notes for the day over a glass of after-dinner liquor, widely awake as an
observer, yet dream-like as a participant. “I had never been able to rationalize, dissect, or understand that
dream-like state. “The
dream-like state stayed with me even in broad daylight when I rushed through
the small alleys of sleepy Hanoi, in and out of rundown government buildings
and villas where Ho Chi Minh portrait smiled his paternal smile upon his
socialist-bureaucrat descendants. It
was Uncle Ho’s same signature smile, in war and in peace. “The
dream-like state persisted when, at sunset, I ran along Hanoi’s misty,
pacifying lakes and rustic temples, capturing into my pupils the vestige of
France in what was left of old Indochina.
You see, I was born in Paris, in 1965, son of an aging father who
married late and had spent time in Indochina.
The colony to me was once a set of black and white photographs, which
turned into life only after I began my international assignment with Agence
France Presse, all happening at a time when France had just returned to her
favorite colony by buying and renovating what she once owned almost a hundred
years ago: the landmark Metropole
Hotel in central Hanoi. “I
made my home in the Metropole and learned my routine quickly, accepting my
hypnotic, dream-like state as part of what Indochina had instilled in me
those days. “Every
Wednesday night, the music bar of the Metropole had a special quartet that
featured the piano, the flute, the violin, and the cello in an array of
popular classical and modern pieces.
The quartet played everything from Pachebell’s Cannon in D to Le Docteur Zivago. The young, skinny classical musicians of
Vietnam who became Metropole lounge performers impressed me with the way they
held their instruments against their slender frame, much more profoundly than
with the sound they made. The poignant dignity they portrayed could only be
matched by nostalgic Indochina herself.
“One
such Wednesday night became memorable, when I looked up from my notes and
found a young woman singing with the quartet.
She looked so out of place, dressed in Western clothes – a long,
black, clinging knit dress and matching cardigan. She was not exceptionally beautiful,
especially in a country full of beautiful and slender women moving like
butterflies in their graceful, body-fitting ao dai. I didn’t find them particularly
attractive. Too fragile and naďve, like
the young limbs of children or vases that could easily break. I didn’t want to handle anything with that
much care, especially in my constant dream-like state. “It
was the woman’s long black dress and penetrating eyes that defined her. The rest of her, except for the black
dress, black eyes and flowing hair, seemed almost transparent in my blood
shot eyes at eleven o’clock at night amid the Cuban cigar smoke of the
travellers who congregated at the
landmark Metropole. She could be
either twenty six or thirty nine, the bearer of those dark eyes looking down
my soul, yet leaving no memorable first impression. Even her voice, clear and
vulnerable, sort of like the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, filled my ears one
second and then dissolved the next, leaving the vibrato almost surreal. She was singing in Vietnamese. In a song, the language sounded less
monosyllabic, less clipping, more melodious and pleasant. A local singer she
was supposed to be, but somehow she looked and acted foreign and out of
place. “Having
gulped down my whisky that night, I was ready to go back to my room when she
caught my eyes. After she ended her
song, I picked up my key from the table.
Fate crept in and I dropped my key.
I looked around my chair. I
couldn’t find the key. ‘Is
this what you are looking for, Monsieur?’ “I
heard the question asked in perfect Parisian French. “I
looked up and found a pair of black patent leather sandals, on a pair of feet
the size of my palm, with seductively painted red toe nails. Above them was
the hem of a black dress. I was stooping on to the carpeted floor, and she
was standing in front of me, too close for comfort, the Vietnamese singer, a
figure in a long black dress with flowing hair. She was holding the key to my room. “You
see, I might have been constantly in my dream-like state, but somehow the colors,
images, lines, and angles of what I saw that night remained perfectly real,
frozen in memory. They formed the moment we met. “MY MIND THOSE DAYS WAS LIKE THAT TRAIN PASSING THROUGH the night
with its rhythmic motion, amidst thunder flashing against a distorted,
blackened horizon. She was the only
real thing in that horizon of dream.
We used to meet every Wednesday night after her performance. She showed me her American passport and
gave me the business card you now hold in your hand. She told me she was a lawyer travelling
from Houston, Texas, to Hanoi, Vietnam to re-establish an office for Coudert
Brothers after its nineteen-year absence from the country. What was a Coudert lawyer doing in the Metropole
Hotel, singing Vietnamese music? I
once asked, and she answered with a question.
What was a young French newsman doing in a music bar at eleven o’clock
at night listening to Vietnamese love songs he could not understand? Le cauchemare, mon pere, et
L’Indochine, I could have said, but of
course she had no business knowing about my nightmare or my father, and I had
no business telling. Agence France
Presse and Coudert Brothers brought us together, she said, and I readily
agreed. We were two adults from two
separate places, intertwined by history, roaming an exotic place for a past
of which we knew nothing, she added.
Again, I readily agreed. “It
was such an odd feeling to have this stranger, a Vietnamese woman you just met,
hold the key to your room, open it, slip in, and stretch herself down on your
bed. From that point on, she became
the steam from an herbal tea pot, colorless yet distinctive. She permeated
into the air, filling my space, my soul, unable to break, neither yielding
nor conquering, never letting go. Making love to her was like descending into
myself, without seeing a path. I returned to the center of me, in a web I
could not understand. “Naturally,
there came a time when Wednesday nights in the Metropole became the core of
my existence in Hanoi, and being
without her meant being engulfed in a total void. My former life in Paris seemed so far away
it existed no more. In that state of mind, I discovered one night how she had
always held more than just the key to my hotel room. “I
followed her once from the Metropole hotel out to the cemented alleys of
Hanoi. We walked under Hanoi’s
moonlight, with her running ahead of me, laughing backward, in the same clear
voice that sang those incomprehensible songs during our Wednesday night
routines. “Move on, Jean Paul,” she said, and I moved
toward the trace of moonlight that shone onto her heels. We walked on, with me following her, as
though the whole night had just begun. “We
stopped in front of a tall, red brick wall, mossy and dull like the
complacent witness of the hundred
years that manifested themselves in the ancient quarters of Hanoi. I looked
up and realized we were in front of some old, hideous building, the familiar
French architecture no longer carrying its charm. She leaned her black clad body against the
damp wall and whispered to me. “Aren’t
we home, Jean Paul?” ‘Your
soul must have wandered around here a hundred years ago,’ she said, laughing
still. ‘Perhaps,’
I joined her in her folly. Everything
was possible in the dream-like state of Indochina. ‘Why
are we here, Jasmine?’ I pressed her against the wall and asked in between a
kiss. --‘Hoa
Lo,’ she said. “The name means a
burning fire stove,” she whispered into my ears. She let me know we were standing against
the back wall of the infamous Hanoi prison, built by the French to hold
Vietnamese patriots. Later on it
became the hell on earth for American pilots. “I
looked down her oval face and found in the streak of moonlight a pair of
inviting lips, puffy in the shade of mauve pinkish orchid. I attempted to wipe the lipstick off with
my thumb, but there was no lipstick to smear.
She said mauve pink was the lip color of Vietnamese girls. During French colonialism, they were all
captured and sent to Hoa Lo, where their mauve lips turned purple. ‘Into the color of blueberry fields,’
she said. “I
looked into the streak of moonlight on her face again and thought those
orchid lips of hers, too, had indeed turned bluish lavender. “One
moment passed, and the next thing I saw was her silhouette running down the
blackened alley, her shiny heels stepping skillfully around little ponds of
rainwater accumulating on the alley, the hem of her dress dancing above them. I followed her again and we crossed many
more alleys and dark, paved streets, before we reached the front gate of an
old brick house. She held my hand and
led me in, telling me we were in the house where her folks once lived. “Almost a hundred years ago,” she
said. She kept on talking. No longer
in her flawless English or French, but in the clipping tonal sounds of her
native tongue. She was pouring out her soul. “We
slipped U.S. dollar bills to the children and adults with scrupulous eyes so that
they would go away, leaving us alone in the dark, humid house where I watched
her squat nude in the courtyard, under a stream of August moon. In the mossy courtyard less than ten feet
wide, near sewage and trash, she scooped rainwater from a slippery clay
container with an old powder milk tin can and poured it on her naked
self. If I had been an artist, I would
have painted the sight of her nudity, but I was no artist, and all I could do
was to carry her wet self inside the house, to the bamboo bed under an opaque
mosquito net, tugged behind an old curtain made out of some cheap flowery
cotton fabric. I held my breath and
toughened my muscles to the point of stillness. I could smell my own sweat and the
unsanitary smell of urban poverty, and the heat seemed eternal in that small
space, and every drop of water residue on her skin became a soothing source
of breeze to take me away from the filthy, stuffy deep alleys of poor Hanoi.
Onto a different world. That of raw
sensual love. I travelled in moments
too precious to be locked up in drawers of memories destined to fade into old
age. ‘There was a young girl
who used to live here,’ she said as I dozed off. “They caught her father and sent him to
Hoa Lo and he died there. The mother took the girl to her village, far away from here, but there was no hiding
from fate, and something happened to the girl later, toward the end of the
war,” her words dimmed away. “In
my usual dream-like state, my body reached out for hers and I seized her lips
when they turned from mauve to lavender.
I was making my way through the damp swamps and jungles of Southeast
Asia and all of the things they did to the Vietnamese patriots and American
pilots held in Hoa Lo were being done to me.
Every nerve ending in me rose and fell and I submerged in the
pain-pleasure-pain cycle that numbed my brain. Love’s tender secret, share it with me, I
kept hearing her voice. The pain-pleasure cycle stopped only after I turned
my sweated body to the first beam of sunlight that pierced through my
eyelids. I regained consciousness that
way, along with the beckoning of the day.
“She was standing nude in
front of the only window in that old house, singing to herself. Voi que sapete che cosa e amor. Donne
vedete s’io l’ho nelcor…You have the answer, you hold the key. Love’s tender secret, share it with
me. Lady, I beg you, share it with
me. The sun had not fully emerged outside
and her silhouette edged against the sheer curtain made out of some cheap
white lace that had turned yellow. But in the gray area where she stood in
the beginning of dawn, the lace appeared virginal. Quietly, I watched her
breathe: the curve of her waist and the smallness of her back heaving up and
down, resembling the fluid shadow of a brown cello edging against a misty
bridal veil. “From
the bed, I watched her turn and look at me in the middle of her song, her
pointed breasts protruding, her eyes full of tears. The sun was gradually
rising behind her, behind all that cello silhouette edging against lacy veil. Lady I beg you share it with me…So what’s
your secret, Jasmine? I yearned and
yearned. “You will know in time,” she
said. “Up
until then, you see, I had only seen her at night. My heart somehow sank into despair as I
watched the first sunray sweep through her dim and pale face. Somehow I knew I would be bound to that
face. I must have fallen in love. --“Why
are you here, Jean Paul?” the tearful almond eyes asked of me. “She
moved slowly toward me and fell onto my chest and my arms held her and I cried
my hot tears into the cooling mass of her hair. I cried into the darkness that imprisoned
me. Lady I beg you, share it with me,
her song still echoing, and I went on to tell her my secret about the old
Frenchman who died in the asylum outside Paris. During the last hours of his
life, the old man was still speaking incessantly of the blueberry fields,
where he had raised the rifle and aimed at the smooth forehead in between a
pair of dark girlish eyes looking up at him in terror. The bloody naked body jerked backward once,
the skull cracked, and then the pair of eyes, wide-opened, bewildered,
despaired and horrified, submerged underneath all that crystal clear
water. At some point, the open pink
mouth and warm mauve pinkish flesh would turn purplish. Into the color of the blueberry
fields. I might have stopped
telling. But the nightmare never
ended. “WEEKS WENT
BY. MY LIFE MOVED ON AND I RETURNED TO
MY Hanoi routine with
wire service assignments and my transient newsman’s existence at the Metropole
Hotel, except that she no longer came to me on Wednesday nights. The quartet
was still playing in the music bar, but she was gone. I waited and waited for any kind of news. “The
news finally came when a handwritten note was delivered to my room one
day. I was to hire a car and a
chauffeur and she would meet me for a day trip to the mountainous areas west
of Hanoi. Her job in Vietnam was finished and she would soon be returning to
Houston, Texas. The handwritten note
contained all of the necessary instructions for my driver to follow. ‘We
must have a proper farewell away from Hanoi,’ the last line of the note said.
“The
car passed through the red dirt hills near the dam Yen Phu overlooking the Red
River, onto the bridge of Phung Thuong, and stopped at the green foothills of
the Tan Vien range, where the dirt road leading to the foothills could no
longer accommodate four-wheeled transport.
She was standing by the dirt road waiting for me, dressed in black
satin pantaloons and a white silk blouse like a proper Vietnamese girl of the
olden days. A black silky shawl
covered half of her face and draped over her shoulders. I could hardly see the flow of her hair on
such a hard, windy day. “It
was the second time I saw her in broad daylight. “I
got off the car and she held my hand and led me into the hilly range ahead of
me, almost reddish against the mid-afternoon sun. She told me we were in the province of Ha
Tay, land of freedom fighters and poets. An ox-pulled cart sluggishly passed
by us, stirring up the red dirt, competing hopelessly with curious moped
drivers who bumped their vehicles up and down the road, their head turning
backward for a glimpse of us as an odd couple – a tall blond Westerner and a
Vietnamese girl dressed in a traditional countryside outfit. The villages and hamlets of north Vietnam
spread themselves before my inquisitive eyes and I followed, again, the
dancing heels of my companion. I moved
in a trance in the foreign landscape of wet farm land, dotted with little,
brown-faced people who bent their skinny back over green rice paddies. “We
kept moving until I heard the sound of a waterfall. ’There,
Jean Paul,’ she pointed, pulling her scarf down to show me her face. “I
looked at the oval face accented by those mauve colored lips I had come to
love, just in time to see the pair of dark eyebrows raising in a mysterious
expression of challenge. I followed the tip of her finger toward the horizon
afar to catch sight of the body of water, sapphire clear underneath the
reddish sun. It was just a pond or a
stream, not a waterfall after all, although the melody of cascading water
passing through rocks jingled in the air, mixed with the pleasant chirping
sounds of singing birds. Beyond the
sparkling water was a purplish, deep blue forest, standing against a pale
blue horizon crisscrossed with darting arrows of reddish light streams. “It
was a breathtaking sight. “A
perfect place reserved for love. Hers
and mine, I thought. “She
was much shorter than I and, tilting on her toes, she reached for my face,
her arms wrapping around my neck. The mauve orchid lips quickly touched
mine. Vaguely I tasted the tangy
sweetness of blueberries. --‘Watch,
Jean Paul, the blueberry fields.
Vietnamese blueberries. The Sim
Tim,’ her sweet voice engulfed my ears.
“She
let go of me and walked toward the purplish blue of the horizon. ’Jasmine,’
I called her name. She stopped and
turned and the sweet voice continued along with the chirping birds: --‘The
girl’s name was Khai, Jean Paul. She
was washing clothes by the stream.
Near the blueberry fields.’ “I
moved. She let go of the scarf. It
flew toward me. Backward, against the
wind. I could hear her words in all
that thin air. ‘Three
French legionnaires found her. They
tore up her clothes and held down her limbs. They took turns, Jean Paul.’ “The
scarf hit my face. Gently, so
gently. Yet, I bent down in pain. ‘They
could just have left her there. But
one Frenchman raised the rifle.’ “The
scarf was covering up my eyes and I could no longer see her face. I heard her words still. --‘Blood
spurted from her forehead and she fell backward. Into the stream. The water was once so clear before it
turned brutally red. Her lips, bruised
and cut, were still the shade of mauve pink.’ --‘No,
Jasmine,’ I cried out in vain. Through
the scarf, I saw her face. It was growing larger and larger, out of
proportion. From the corner of my
eyes, her lips looked purplish blue. --‘The
villager found her two days later, floating down the stream, toward the
blueberry fields. Her lips had turned
purple, Jean Paul.’ “I
scraped the scarf off my face and let it fly.
I looked into the horizon of blueberry fields and no longer saw her
face. ‘Farewell,
Jean Paul,’ I heard her voice for the last time. “Sunset
was approaching. Darkness gradually
descended upon the Tan Vien foothills, and I found myself alone in the
wilderness, facing all those blueberries.
She was no where to be found.
There was no trace of her, except for that flying scarf. “I SPENT THE
NEXT THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE TRAVELLING ALL over
Vietnam looking for the owner of that scarf. I longed for the familiar shade of orchid pink
in lips that turned lavender and then purplish at nighttime. “I
never found her. Nor those vivid
colors and shapes that haunted my memory since then. “I
headed next toward the United States. Orange County, California and then
Houston, Texas, land of the Vietnamese immigrants.” “FIND HER FOR ME AT ANY RATE, S’IL VOUS
PLAIT,” MY GROWN-UP version of The Little Prince said to me, his blue
eyes searching urgently for a promise.
I
was Uncle Ten, man of cosmos. I should
have made such a promise. But I
didn’t. He
left my workshop with a stint of hope, still, shown in the handshake and the
turn of the blond head at the door.
The blue eyes were still pleading for a common belief. Left alone in my
workshop, I sighed and felt genuinely sad.
I should have told him the blueberry fields were a common Vietnamese
metaphor for love in wartime. All educated Vietnamese raised in the aftermath
of French colonialism knew this. Perhaps my grown-up Little Prince knew this.
Perhaps he didn’t. Blueberry fields existed only in a poem, written by a
Vietnamese romanticist during his participation in the hellish battle of Dien
Bien Phu. The poet-warrior dedicated
it to a beautiful young woman who had
died during the Indochinese war. Growing up in Vietnam, I had never seen
blueberry fields. I mentioned the term
at the beginning of my meeting with Jean Paul, purely out of gut instinct and
my own notion of fantasy. After all, I was Uncle Ten, Houston’s only man of
cosmos. Duong NhuNguyen Nov. 30, 1999© UND · THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467), Volume
4, Number 2 July 2002
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