Daughters of the River Huong Read online

  All of this was déjà vu.

  It was this disturbing dream that caused me to move out of the apartment. We had been together almost ten years when I decided to reveal the dream to Christopher. A few days after hearing about the dream, my husband gave me Dr. Cookie D’Amico’s office number. Dr. D’Amico is Southeast Asian like me, and he thought she would be of help. I began seeing her, and after a few months, Dr. D’Amico the psychologist gradually became Ms. Cookie my friend, although initially I was a little suspicious of the psychologist’s pep talks. I told her what I knew from my heart: that the dancers were the women of the extinct culture of Champa. She did some research and formed a theory about the connection between my central Vietnamese ancestry and the story of the Chams, an extinct race.

  I was too strong-willed to believe entirely in Western psychotherapy, although in Ms. Cookie I eventually confided all of my fears. Since the fall of Saigon, I had dreaded any kind of separation—the anxiety of leaving a place knowing perhaps I will never see it again. Cookie said the anxiety naturally must have come from my traumatic departure from Vietnam. The whole circle of my husband’s friends in New York City must have heard of my airlift escape from Saigon in 1975 atop the U.S. Embassy, during the last hours before the Russian tanks rolled toward Saigon’s Presidential Palace. I’d heard enough comments made behind my back at cocktail receptions and Christmas parties. The story went that I was my husband’s underaged mail-order bride straight from a refugee camp. I’d never bothered to correct the record: technically I was not a mail-order bride because we actually met in Saigon days before the change of guards.

  Initially, I had gone to see Cookie only to please my husband because, after all, he was paying her enough money to feed a whole Vietnamese village. Having a shrink was part of my becoming American, something considered trendy in my Manhattan life, like the fox coat he had bought me as a birthday present to protect my fragile frame from New York’s harsh winters. So, when I first heard Cookie’s interpretation of my dream, I had the urge to tell him. The check he sent to Cookie monthly had to bear its fruit. I mentioned this to him at dinner one night.

  “You’ve heard of the Chams from central Vietnam?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Christopher answered. “I reported on the place.”

  “According to Cookie, I’m a descendant of the Chams, and that’s part of my problem.”

  “Huh. Actually, I could see the connection between you and the Chams.” He leaned back in his chair. “The bridge of your nose is higher than the average Vietnamese nose, and you’re much taller than the average Vietnamese. If it weren’t for your fair skin, I would say you look partly East Indian. You’re also not exactly the typical unexpressive Vietnamese woman.”

  I went on excitedly like a passionate lecturer before a class of wide-eyed students.

  “My mother and maternal grandmother are from central Vietnam. Before the fifteenth century, central Vietnam used to be the Kingdom of Champa. Back then, the Chams fought the Vietnamese quite often, until the King of Vietnam married off his sister, some beautiful duchess, to a Cham king in exchange for land. So, the duchess was sold off into a loveless marriage for the good of the nation. Later, she might have been burned to death in accordance with Cham custom when her older husband, the Cham king, passed away. It must be my cultural subconscious mind that created those dreams and all my nostalgia.”

  “Are you truly nostalgic, or just resentful?” Christopher asked casually.

  “According to Cookie, I bear in me the collective subconscious of an extinct culture, with all its tragedy, which could trace back thousands of years, and that’s why I am never truly happy, although I have all the reasons in the world to be happy. You see, I’m so lucky…”

  I had been speaking more to myself than to him, until he made a sound with his glass of water, causing me to stop. He had put the glass down on the table perhaps too forcefully. When I looked, he had finished dinner, and his glass was empty with the linen napkin thrown over it. He got up from the dining table, apparently heading toward the library.

  “Really?” he said. “That’s interesting, but the theory sounds awfully complicated and far-fetched. I have a better explanation for your unhappiness, although I’m no psychologist.”

  He stopped to turn around to meet my eyes. “You’ve already hinted to me several times about the Vietnamese duchess who was sold off in exchange for the Chams’ land. You’re obsessed with the story. What’s her name?”

  “Huyen Tran. It was also the name of the street where my ancestral house was in Hue. The street was named after the princess.”

  “But this isn’t about the name of a street, is it, Simone? For years you kept singing a folk song about this self-sacrificing duchess in the shower.”

  “Did I?” I stopped eating. “I must have, but I didn’t think you noticed.”

  “Oh yes, I did. I notice everything. In fact, I know the folk song. You forgot too quickly that I lived in your former home for years. It was your father who taught it to me:

  ‘Pity her, a lily-white rice grain, bathed in the disgrace of shameful stain, washed out in muddy water, burned in straw flame…’”

  He took his eyes off me and turned toward the door to the hallway, while continuing talking:

  “I think you sang it deliberately for me to hear, Simone. If you could, you would sing it, too, in the middle of our lovemaking.”

  He stopped momentarily at the door and turned toward me again. I lowered my eyes to avoid his gaze.

  “I married you, Simone, but I’m not the man you wanted to marry had it not been for the fall of Saigon. I’m not stupid. The simple truth is you’re always unhappy because you are here with me, and I can’t do anything about it but to send you to law school, and then to Cookie. But what was the alternative? Should I have left you in Vietnam with the Communists?”

  I dropped my napkin and leaned over to pick it up from the floor.

  When I looked up, he was gone.

  That night, as he was reading in bed, I opened the closet to find the gift box that contained the sequin dress he had given me for Valentine’s Day. The dress had never been worn.

  I knew what I wanted to do. I had been his faithful girl, but despite our years together, I could not bring myself to tell him I loved him, knowing that the words were what he longed for to fortify our peace. The nature of our marriage was supposedly understood between us. It was not to be spoken. I thought we both accepted that code of conduct. Yet, this night, he had broken that code by speaking the truth, which had become an accusation of how I had wronged him.

  There remained the other truth, never once spoken—his friendship with my father in Vietnam. He married me but, as a son-in-law, had never made an effort to speak to my father. Of course, it was awkward. So, he just conveniently chose to ignore this other truth.

  So, I held the dress up and asked him to get me a pair of scissors.

  He was sitting on the bed, doing what I disliked most: smoking his cigar. I stood for a long time holding the black, clingy material in my hands. I could put the dress back in the closet, go over, and stretch myself out next to him so that the tension between us would quickly evaporate. Yet I stood still. Cigar smoke lingered on my skin, on every strand of my hair. From the bed, he got up casually, too casually, in order to put on some jazz music. He returned to the bed and put on his reading glasses.

  I repeated that I would like a pair of scissors.

  When he didn’t move, I became overwhelmed with a titanic anger that made my hands shake. I tore at the sequin dress, scratching my knuckles. He remained nonchalant, watching me the same way he watched a late-night TV show. Then he slid open the nightstand drawer, took out a pair of scissors, and yanked the dress from me. He began cutting, and sequins fell around us like confetti. I slumped down on the carpeted floor, terrified to see the sharp and swift blades shred the sparkling fabric. I began crying. He grimaced as he threw the scissors against the dresser mirror, crashing the glass into th
readed shards. There, I found our distorted faces. My tears must have moved him, and he leaned over and gathered me into his arms. I might have fought him, but he was twice my size. He put me down on the bed and collapsed next to me, as though the whole episode had the unbearable weight of a building falling in an earthquake. We lay there, perhaps both feeling sorry for what we had done to each other, yet knowing not what to do or say. I wanted badly to climb over him and kiss his chest to seal the gap between us. Perhaps he would raise his chin and catch my lips, and we would make up. But I remained stiff.

  For a long time, I listened to him breathe sadly next to me. Finally, with the constructed effort of a defeated soldier, I curled up in the fetal position. Slowly he moved to face me, entangling my limbs. I wanted to pull him to me so that the weight of his dense body would shield me from the cold that had begun to creep up in my chest.

  Another déjà vu. It was the same sweeping cold that chilled me that day in April 1975 when I first met him. Room 210 in the historic Continental Hotel downtown Saigon. Then, his rhythm, no matter how ruthless and relentless, was, after all, the only thing I knew how to use to rid me of the cold that had seeped from the marble floor of the Continental Hotel into my skin and limbs, the icy spread of a city’s death. I knew, then, that in any passion he had for me, I would feel nothing but death spelling itself out, in coffins floating on the river of childhood.

  I had not even told Cookie about the coffins during those couch sessions in her office. I had wanted a sacred place for them, a secret burial ground. The secret became my last bond to my childhood, and to the woman who had raised me. Her name was Cinnamon, and she lived and died in Hue.

  Madame Cinnamon was the one who first saw all those floating coffins. On what I called the River of Cinnamon.

  Those were the Coffins of Cinnamon.

  The flashback was gone when my husband began to move. He got up from the bed to gather the pieces of sequins from what was left of the dress. He even picked up the scissors and placed them back in the drawer of the nightstand.

  “Oh, Simone,” Christopher said, “whom did you love so much that you’re still crying for him? Did he even exist, or has he become all of Vietnam in your pretty head? I can always beat up a man, but how can I beat up a place that’s already been beaten down in a war we lost?”

  The following morning, I packed a few things and moved to the Hyatt uptown under the pretense of having to work. He helped me pack and even drove me there. There was no ultimatum, no discussion, as though we each had reached an implicit understanding of the future. I had a marketable degree, a career, and could survive without him. I had grown used to the fast pace of New York City. At thirty, I still had my radiant youth, the beginning of a promising career with a prestigious Manhattan law firm, and a hefty starting salary.

  I could have given up my key to our apartment, but he insisted that I keep it. He was so calm about it that I wondered whether he suffered at all from my decision, whether he had ever loved me, still loved me, or had stopped loving me.

  I took my eyes off Lucinda’s flower arrangement and continued walking down the hardwood hallway with careful footsteps. Behind the library door he must have been listening with equal care, as though counting the rhythm of my heels to decipher my emotions. I reached the library door, and the silence made me quiver. I drew another deep breath and pushed the door open.

  The chair behind the mahogany desk was empty. The library was not well lit. I heard a quiet cough and then the sound of the lighter. I spotted him near the bay window, lighting a cigar. His face was haggard, as though he hadn’t slept in days. It had been months since I had last seen him, and somehow his face had changed. He nodded at me. As he tried to move away from the window, I saw he was in a wheelchair.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I panicked.

  He blew out a writhing stream of smoke.

  “Right after you left, I fell and broke my knee; I couldn’t get my balance anymore. They discovered bad cells in my bone marrow. After all the tests, they told me it had gotten to my brain. I decided not to have the surgery at first, but I’m going in tomorrow for the operation. That’s why I called you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I said, anguished.

  “Why? I’ve had symptoms for months and you didn’t even notice.”

  I knelt next to his wheelchair, and he turned the wheel away to avoid me. I tried to reach him with one hand, and he let out a small cry of pain, which took me aback. In what was left of the afternoon sun from the bay window, his face looked thin and pale, but his jaw line was set with a stamp of resolution.

  “Don’t touch the knee. It hurts,” he said.

  Quietly, he stroked my hair and raised my chin to look into my tearful eyes. “You should make it a goal in life to remarry, this time to someone you love.”

  It felt as though some thick, unseen curtain divided us in the surrounding silence. Above us, the Swiss cuckoo clock struck its notes. Seven of them. Clear, factual, and precise, like the polished furniture in his library. He leaned over to pull me to him, but the wheelchair got in the way. He sighed but managed to hold my shoulders nonetheless. He unbuttoned my silk blouse and caressed the curve of my flesh, but his touch was so slight, and I felt almost nothing except for the dry skin of his fingertips.

  He let go of me, wheeled himself away from me, back toward the window.

  “You don’t understand, do you,” he said, “that every man, bright or mediocre, rich or poor, cruel or kind, ugly or handsome, has his own fantasy: that he is loved unequivocally by some beautiful stranger who just happens to throw herself at him out of no reason. All these years since you arrived, I’ve kept on hoping that someday you would beam at me, tell me the fall of Saigon was a blessing in disguise, and that the day we met in the Continental Hotel was the day you accidentally found your Prince Charming who made your life right.”

  “You did make my life right. More than that, you kept your promise.”

  “That was all, wasn’t it?”

  I stood still. He was a proud man. A proud man does not reveal his vulnerability unless he is certain he is encountering death.

  “You’ve always been too honest to lie,” he said. “You kept telling me you were a refugee. All a refugee wants is a refuge.”

  I thought of the mutated cells inside his bone. Fighting me had to be his way to fight them. He had paused to take a drag, and a wry grin appeared on his exhausted face.

  “I thought a lot about how you would finally leave me,” he said. “Some man from Columbia Law School, down Madison Avenue, in Central Park, or at that goddamned law firm of yours, would come along to take you away, and there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it.”

  He signaled for me to move away, enough to create space between us. He put his hand inside the robe’s pocket and took out a key.

  “It goes to the safe-deposit box, where I keep your family’s heirlooms. In there, you’ll also find an old tape. Remember when you came in to my hotel room, the tape recorder was on, and I was dictating? It’s all there, what happened.”

  I moved back next to the wheelchair and placed my head on his hand.

  He raised my chin and looked into my eyes. “Those eyes. I fell in love with them. Yet I don’t think I even know you. How could that be true? For almost ten years I’ve watched you, and I still can’t see underneath.”

  I blinked, and a tear fell onto his wrist, like a crystal through which I could see part of my childhood. I began to talk. It was the first time I spoke to him about the little girl. More tears flowed down, falling like rain onto the little girl’s lotus ponds, all in an ancient city that existed no more. The image blurred amid my tears, like in autumn rain and spreading mist.

  The year was 1965. The ancient city of Hue, central Vietnam. That year, the little girl had just turned ten.

  2. LOTUS PONDS

  (Hue, the Republic of Vietnam, 1965)

  Mauve lotuses and their mossy green leaves covered one side of the ro
ad on my way to meet the Spirit of the Perfume River.

  On that day, I was wearing a dress with prints that told the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” In bright sunshine, Snow White and her blue dwarfs whirled against a pinkish sky along the hemline of my dress. When I walked, they all walked with me. The dress had spaghetti straps hidden under a short-sleeved bolero jacket. I had just turned ten, and the dress had been a birthday gift from Grandma Que.

  We were going inside the Citadel to see Mey Mai, who would tell my fortune for the first time. We lived outside the Citadel that once separated commoners from the royal Violet City, situated in the center of the ancient capital, Hue. The Citadel, Thanh Noi, represented the king of Annam’s abode and Hue’s past glory.

  Mai was the fortuneteller’s given name. Mei meaning “the old wise” in Vietnamese, was a courtesy title reserved for old women. As a young girl, Mai had been a royal chambermaid in the Violet City, serving my great-grandmother, Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine of the king of Annam. When the king abdicated, Huyen Phi and Mai left the Violet City for a new life in the village. My Grandma Que, the daughter of the Mystique Concubine, was only five years old then, and Mai, the royal maid, became Grandma Que’s nanny. Together, Huyen Phi and Mai learned how to raise silkworms. They supplied fine silk to all of Annam and beyond, even to French and Indian merchants off the coast.

  I knew before I learned to write my own name that we were descendants of the legendary Mystique Concubine. An ink-on-silk portrait of Huyen Phi hung behind the family altar. I stood for hours looking at her, scrutinizing her features. Her eyebrows were two swordlike, slanting ink strokes, the nose another vertical stroke, and her mouth two dots forming a little cherry. Huyen Phi did not look like a real person, let alone any of us.