Postcards From Nam Read online

  I frantically paced my bedroom, knocking against furniture. My heart pounded as my mind achingly went back in time. I just could not remember. Who was Nam? He must have known me well, from days of childhood. Knowledge equated intimacy. This time, the mysterious Nam (and I just knew intuitively he was a man) had clearly put himself in the blurred space of intimacy called the past.

  It was 1989 and, for the first time since our departure from Vietnam fourteen years ago, I called my mother to review the life we left behind after the fall of Saigon. She was living in Texas. The emergency late-night phone call was to seek her help.

  “Do I have any cousin named Nam, Mother?” I asked.

  My mother went through a long list of relatives, many of whom remained in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. No one was named Nam.

  “There must be someone by that name,” I almost anguished.

  At the other end of the phone line, my mother sounded worried. “This must be very important to you,” she probed.

  I told her about the postcards and its mysterious author. She, too, became worried. We painstakingly went through the inventory of relatives in Vietnam one more time.

  “This phantom cousin, he draws pictures pretty well. He created his own postcards,” I said in vain.

  After a long pause, my mother cried out with satisfaction.

  “Oh how could I forget?” she exclaimed. “Nam was the oldest son of your neighbors, the Pham family. They lived across the alley from us. The nice kid played with your brother, Pi, all the time. Yes, he did draw very well. The kid had talent.”

  It was only then that the dark corner of my mind lit up, flashing the image of a boy named Nam. His oval face, ivory skin, soft voice, and trembling lips. His crew cut and khaki shorts. His mild manner and lowered eyelids. Nam was so shy he rarely looked me in the eye. Memory of Nam came back simultaneously with my grandmother’s soothing voice and distinctive tonal accent that typifies the inhabitants of Hue. She always complimented him. “He is a pretty boy, as well as the nicest boy,” she always said.

  I did not understand how I could have blocked out that part of my life in which a little boy named Nam existed. My mother said in trying too hard to be American, I must have forgotten certain things to store new things as a way to transfer and transform identity. What was not important was eliminated to make room for other things. She concluded Nam was just a neighbor, and to me, he must not have been too terribly important. That was why I forgot him.

  I did not find my mother’s theory to be convincing, yet I did not want to argue the point. Later on, in reminiscing and regaining my memory of Nam, I poignantly came to understand how my subconscious mind worked. My mother did not know that to me, Nam was not just a neighbor. And I disagreed that only the insignificant events were forgotten. To the contrary, I was Freudian in my premise that quite often, the most shocking events of our lives got blocked out for survival’s sake. I must have associated Nam with my Vietnamese childhood, which consisted of memories of my grandmother, who raised me, and our family’s traumatic escape from Vietnam at the end of the war. In 1975, at the fall of Saigon, we had to leave my grandmother in Vietnam to join the American airlift. A few years later after the fall of Saigon, my grandmother died alone after a short illness, due to lack of food and medical care, during the dark days of a unified Communist Vietnam. In affluent America, for a long time, I could not deal with the pain caused by my grandmother’s death, or the trauma of our departure from Saigon.

  Memories revived in mysterious ways, as inexplicably and randomly as they had been suppressed. All of a sudden after so many years, I remembered that when I left home, I had asked Nam, my neighbor and friend, to watch over my grandmother for me, and Nam had promised he would. In my memory of a Vietnamese childhood, my grandmother’s death and Nam must have coexisted somehow. In an effort to close that part of my life to forget Vietnam and the pain, I must have unconsciously rejected all memory of Nam.

  Until the postcards arrived and opened the wound.

  2. THE ALLEY OF DISTRICT EIGHT, SAIGON

  I have a theory about memory. We never completely forget. We only bandage ourselves. What is underneath the Band-Aid consists of memory. One day, we must peel off the Band-Aid to look at what has become of us underneath. The mind can become a container of rainwater, fresh, cool, and clear, because all mud has deposited at the bottom. But the mud never dissolves. It just settles. A gush of wind can stir the mud at any time, disturbing the particles of the past.

  My memory of Nam is like that small gush of wind, brushing against my arm and then quickly vanishing, leaving upon my skin the sensation of aroused baby hair, responding to the brushing wind that disturbs the status quo. Every time I recall that brushing wind, the baby hair on my arm rises again, and the sensation revitalizes into a new reality. In that moment of recollection, a little boy named Nam materializes before me, moving and speaking, waving his guileless arms, running alongside the little alleys of a faraway Saigon on a pair of Boy-Scout skinny legs that resemble young bamboo shoots. Those days, in my grandmother’s words, Nam was the pretty boy, as well as the nicest boy, of our neighborhood in District Eight.

  By the time the Tet Offensive of 1968 was over, our family had been well settled into a crowded neighborhood at the end of a long, winding alley in District Eight, Saigon. When it rained, the little alley was flooded with water. Little boys in the neighborhood ran out to the street for a quick shower, barefoot, wet, and shivering in their cotton shorts. The boys yelled out all kinds of phrases in their authentic Saigonese accent, dropping all ng and nh endings, making no distinction between the /?/ and the /~/ inflection, harshening the staccato effect of the monosyllabic, tonal language. Their screams and Saigonese speech became an unexpected vocal symphony, punctuating and syncopating oddly against the steady rhythm of the rain.

  The boys danced and took their showers in the rain. In my poignant recollection, they became the premonition of America’s rap artists, performing in Saigon’s alleys of the seventies, in all that tropical rain, where cold and heat met on the boys’ skinny frames, bare torsos, slender arms and feet.

  Back then, I often watched the scene with amazement and disdain. Running around almost naked in the rain was not my idea of a well-bred child, which was the self-image imposed upon me by my grandmother. My job those days as a big sister was to keep my brother Pi from joining the boys in the neighborhood.

  Our townhouse, which used to be a day-care center, was old and relatively larger than most houses in the neighborhood. When we first moved in, the orange tile floor was already very worn, all scratched up and dull-looking, but my parents, who were schoolteachers, did not have the money to replace it. The kitchen window opened to a small deserted parcel of land, on which lay a tomb. My father translated for me the Chinese characters carved on the tombstone. The epitaph bore the name of a Chinese man, born in the southern province of Canton more than a hundred years ago, and buried in District Eight, Saigon.

  To me, the window opening to the tomb became the least attractive feature of the house. When my father bought the house, he did not know about the tomb. Now that the tomb was a fait accompli, all my parents could do to make peace with the spirit of the Chinaman was to burn incense for him now and then. Since the Chinaman had died so long ago, my grandmother assured me that his spirit must have been reincarnated. Or, it must have returned to Canton. The spirit of an expatriate always returned to his birthplace, my grandmother said.

  The incense my parents burned for the old man did not eliminate my fear. The hair on the back of my head stood up each time I had to go to the kitchen late at night, feeling the ominous presence of an old Cantonese ghost snarling at me from outside the window.

  Once my parents announced that the modest townhouse of District Eight would be our permanent home, we learned to make do. During the summer when my father did not have to teach school, he renovated the house on his own, including the retiling of the floor. The biggest project was to knock down walls an
d open a bedroom into an interior courtyard, where my mother could pot tropical flowers. My father also built a concrete tank there to store rainwater, and a patio barely large enough for three or four small chairs. We could watch the sunset or have a tea party there, my mother reasoned. In reality, the little patio was used more for hanging wet clothes than for holding tea parties or watching the sunset.

  During my father’s prolonged, amateurish renovation projects, we lived for months among piles of red bricks, ill-smelling cement, and debris. Little Pi learned to become an amateur mason, mixing cement with water under the instruction of my father. Pi could not have been happier to undertake the task. To him, it must have been like playing with sand on a simulated seashore enclosed in our own home. At night, Pi went to sleep with cement under his fingernails. Watching the renovation going on in our house, the women in the neighborhood, sweaty and brown, wearing rubber slippers under frayed black trouser hems, would point and gossip:

  “Look, here is Mr. Schoolteacher, ong giao, and also a mason!”

  Dragging bags of debris outside, I overheard their curious comments. The Confucian Vietnamese way of life did not value blue-collar labor, so the women could not understand why a man of letters like my father would work with cement and bricks. I prayed my father would never start another renovation project and, instead, would sell the house and move elsewhere, to a different neighborhood where we had some privacy. It meant no more congested rows of old townhouses nestling against one another in crowded alleys.

  I hated everything that was going on those days in the alleys of District Eight. I kept dreaming of French villas and spacious garden homes, which my parents could not afford in crowded Saigon.

  In the beginning, our move to the neighborhood immediately attracted attention. The reason was quite simple: we had a TV and a piano. At night, little children from poorer families crowded our door, smiling their innocent little smiles, in hopes of catching a glimpse at the black-and-white TV screen. My father, if he was in a good mood, would open the door and let them in. They stood quietly around the TV, or squatted on the smudge-filled tiled floor, all staring without a blink at the flickering screen, mesmerized and stupefied as though they were witnessing the descent of a flying saucer. The outer space analogy was used by one of the kids who gathered around our TV:

  “Little people captured in a black box that shone like lightning, coming from outer space,” the kid exclaimed in astonishment, his mouth opening in an “O” shape as he gazed at the TV screen.

  In the crowd of children congregating around my family’s TV, the skinny, pale little boy stood out somehow. Despite his metaphoric statement, the black box and all those little people it captured did not hold his attention very long. He started staring, instead, at my piano keyboard and all of my music books. His stare was so intense I was concerned he might touch or steal something. I was very protective of my piano and my music. So I closed the lid and put my music sheets inside the piano bench. He stared at me instead. His almond eyes contained a thousand questions.

  I recognized him again, one day when it rained and the neighborhood boys started their shower-in-the-rain charade. From the window I could see their bodies fleeting by, their thin, fragile, naked chests shivering above shorts that stuck to their skinny legs, displaying their protruding knees. In the blink of an eye, Pi sneaked out of the house. I ran after him with an umbrella. The neighborhood boys knocked my umbrella over. In no time, both Pi and I were soaked with rain, and we shivered like two wet mice under the tropical rain that poured mercilessly on us.

  For the rest of my life, I could never forget the smell of the earth under the heavy rain of tropical Saigon.

  In retrospect, that must have been the first time in my young life when I experienced the sensuality of bathing in the rain in the heat and humidity of Saigon. That day I stood in the alley, closing my eyes, my face turned toward the stormy sky. I forgot all about Pi, concentrating instead on the pouring rain tapping onto my face. Water dripped from my hair to the inside of my cotton blouse, sending shivers all through my thin body. The humidity permeated the stuffy air. I felt drunk in the smell of the earth, in the cold, pouring rain that cooled the heated ground underneath my trembling feet.

  When I opened my eyes and wiped my face, I saw the same pair of almond eyes that had stared at my piano. My face must have reddened with shame. I was not supposed to enjoy this unladylike sport. My job was to keep my brother from adopting this awful habit of bathing in the rain. I was, after all, a well-behaved young girl and precious granddaughter trained in manners by my aristocratic grandmother, who happened to be a direct descendant of the last Vietnamese royal family, the Nguyen Dynasty!

  So I ran after Pi again, hoping to restrain him. The boy with almond eyes ran after me.

  “Hi! Why are you running? Can I help?”

  I ignored him. I caught Pi’s hands and dragged my brother back into the house. Pi started yelling and struggling, defying my big-sister authority, while the neighborhood boys applauded. Things were getting out of hand, I thought.

  “Why can’t he play with us?” Nam yelled after me.

  I turned around and said, like a proper lady:

  “Because we come from a decent family. We used to live in Hue, the ancient capital city where there were kings and queens who taught people to be well behaved. We won’t play these silly games like you.”

  I had no problem being a snob. I pushed Pi inside and turned around to close the front gate. Before the gate was completely closed, I saw again those almond eyes on a pale little boy, looking in so intensely.

  I was getting used to the neighborhood, but could not get over my fear of the Chinese tomb. One late afternoon I had to run an errand for my mother. I had to walk by the tomb site alone.

  In the early evening twilight, the narrow path running by the tomb site seemed endless, although I could see our kitchen window around the corner. Overwhelmed with fear, I tiptoed alongside the farthest edge of the path and deliberately turned my face away from the tomb. My feet dragged behind me until they froze and I could no longer move forward. I saw the front gate to our house, but could not bring myself to step ahead.

  “Are you afraid?

  The same little boy with almond eyes and crew cut appeared around the corner. “No, I am not afraid,” I said proudly. My neck craned high, yet my feet could not move.

  He could see through my facade, though, and I did not like it. He jumped out ahead of me, cut his way through the path, and ended up at the top of the tomb. In an instant, he was standing next to the tombstone.

  “Don’t be afraid. He is my friend.” Nam touched the tombstone. “Meet the senior mandarin, Mr. Au.”

  He extended his hand and made a gesture for me to join him.

  “Not in a million years,” I said. “How do you know his name? Do you read Chinese?”

  “He told me.”

  “You are lying. By the way, if he is your friend, you are not showing much respect. You are standing on his head.” I pointed.

  “No, I am not,” Nam said, leaning against the tombstone. “His head is the other way.” Nam pointed. “Mr. Au preferred doing things backward. So he wanted to be buried with his toes right here.” Nam tapped on the tombstone.

  The evening was getting darker. The last ray of sunlight was dancing on the alley, among shades of crowded, age-old urban roofs.

  “You are goofy,” I told Nam.

  He jumped again, and in another instant, he was by my side.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of. I will take care of you.”

  I will take care of you. It felt strange to hear a boy say such a thing.

  “I will take care of you,” Nam said again, with the confidence of a fearless boy.

  “I’ll walk with you to your house,” Nam said, his hand reaching for mine. I let him hold my hand. I felt safer.

  When I got to my house, I was too proud to thank Nam. So I just quietly withdrew my hand. Before I closed the door, I saw, again, hi
s almond eyes, staring down at the spot in my gut where fear had once been, yet had subsided because he had held my hand.

  From that day on, occasionally Nam fed me tales about his Chinese friend, the ghost called Mr. Au, and how the old man had traveled from Canton to District Eight of Saigon and made his home there. Nam claimed Mr. Au died from eating too many ten-thousand-year-old duck eggs, a Chinese delicacy. His tales did not scare me, partly because they became more and more fascinating and funny, and partly because I let Nam hold my hand during his tale telling. It made me feel safe.

  Those days in the back alley of District Eight, Saigon, time passed by slowly, but teenagers grew faster than time. Nam grew taller, and I grew taller.

  Nam’s parents, Uncle Pham and Auntie Hoai, had become my parents’ friends. Auntie Hoai, who stayed home and did not work, consorted very well with my grandmother. Uncle Pham, who drove a taxi for a living, often gave my grandmother free rides to the temple of Vinh Nghiem for her Buddha-worshiping sessions. Nam came to the house quite often to play with Pi. He still stared surreptitiously at my piano. He even touched the keyboard. I let him.

  Always my snobbish and cocky self, I was never well integrated into the circle of the neighborhood kids. I did not want to change just for the sake of having friends. My grandmother, who was a descendant of the extended royal family, had announced her intention to train me to be a future queen, with proper posture and demeanor. So, I paid little attention to Nam. Yet when he came to the house to look for Pi, I found myself blushing in his presence. Because of those intense almond eyes.

  In his quiet way, Nam learned my routines and habits. I discovered this one day.

  I attended school in the morning and practiced piano in the afternoon. During one of those practices, Nam sneaked in and listened.