After four years in this country, Huong still wasn’t accustomed to the cold. Summers in the city were bearable and even temperate once the sun chased out the fog. Unfortunately, those few golden months were over in a blink before winter came charging in, bone-chilling in a way that could crush you like a train. She blamed Elle’s sickness on the dramatic climate change.
Since their arrival, Huong and Viet had been doing their best to get on and get by. They started off with no savings, no English, and only the clothes on their backs. Now, they had stable jobs. Huong joined the movement to make “computers the wave of the future” and worked as an electronics technician assembling circuit boards. Viet was a mailman. His pay wasn’t great but the benefits were good since it was a government job. After four years of scratching by, they had saved enough to move out from the cramped 22nd Ave. house they had shared with her brother and sister and their kids.
Their landlord, the Japanese Baptist Church has said, “Choose God or get out.”
Huong told Viet, “I want to become an American citizen. I believe in democracy. And I choose to be Buddhist.” She was choosing freedom over the collective family unit. That was the moment of truth when she realized how slowly but surely Americanized they’d become.
Her sister Kim had moved across the city to the Mission with her little Sophia and Marcel. Huong didn’t worry about Kim. She was tough as nails, blade sharp, whip-smart and as soon as Duc was sponsored over, they’d be fine. Her brother Lam had followed his job with a computer software company to San Jose. He bragged that this place called Silicon Valley was the “Hollywood of the next decade.” It was the new dream making machine in America. Despite his bravado, Huong hoped it was true for his sake and the sake of the boys.
Huong prayed this new job and the better pay would appease Lam’s demons. Throughout the years on 22nd Ave., her insomnia made her witness to his tantrums. In the middle of the night, she could hear the slap of his belt on skin. The double insulated walls did nothing to muffle Trang’s cries or the boys’ pleading. Huong hated those thin walls. She hated what she had learned about her own brother; how his bitterness about this new life beset those he loved most. She hated the excuses she made for him in the mornings in order to look him in the eye again. And most of all, she hated that everyone in the house probably heard it too. Yet nobody spoke out in the cowardly name of not betraying one’s blood. Not ever her, the self-righteous outspoken girl of the family. She hated what she had discovered about herself.
At their new apartment, Huong most cherished the new-found privacy in which to live her life. She didn’t care that it wasn’t beautiful. She didn’t mind that it was a box-like duplex on the second floor, stuffed between people above and below like a sandwich. It was clean, in walking distance to the Park, and most importantly, it was all hers.
She could hear her father saying, “It has to have the right essence and the proper proportions to be a healing tool.” He was known to be the best doctor in the South because he combined his French education with the folk methods. She prayed she had inherited his sensibility as she was sifting through a pile of twigs.
Michelle ran up bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and said, “This is it.” The little one was right. The stick fit right through the xu.
Huong said, “Let’s keep looking.”
Michelle said, “But why?”
“I’d like something smoother.”
“Mom, it’s impossible to find a smooth one.”
Huong said, “Are you talking back to me? Do you know I have to use it as a handle? You want me to get calluses? My hand to bleed?”
Michelle rubbed her tennis shoes together. She scrunched up her face like a cabbage. “But I want to go play.” She pointed into the fenced playground. Her attention was focused on a child spinning on a merry-go-round.
“Your sister’s sick in bed and you want to play?”
“I wish I was sick like Elle. Sicker even!” Michelle began to cry. Snot ran down her lip. She sniffled, “You only love me when I’m sick.”
The wind hurled more leaves at them and along with it the screeching laughter of children. The gurgling sounds of joy made Michelle cry even harder. Huong had no choice but to say, “Fine, for a few minutes, but go get cleaned up first.”
She dropped Michelle’s stick into her pink grocery bag. It went in with all the leaves they’d been gathering since sunrise: the grapefruit leaves from a neighbor’s yard, the lime leaves by the pizza parlor, the lemon leaves beside the liquor store, and the eucalyptus leaves from the grounds of the park itself.
Huong settled on a wooden bench on the edge of the playgroud. She sat facing the slide. In front of her, a little boy rode down the aluminum slide. He reminded Huong of her son. He smiled at her when he scooted his butt off the shiny ramp. His dimples were big and fat and perfectly kissable. He was around the age her son would have been if he’d lived.
With only two kids, she didn’t know how she had raised such a strangely selfish child, no consideration, and an ingrate to boot. When she was Michelle’s age, there were so many kids in her family, they were called by numbers. “Girl number Five, go help Six and Seven bathe before dinner.” In South Vietnam, odd numbers were deemed unlucky so the first-born was always designated number two.
Huong was girl number Four in a family of six children. Her boy would have been number Four just like her. If he was still alive she would call him her pinky, a term of endearment for the baby in the family. Every night before putting herself to bed, she wished for his return. Instead she was left with the memory of her baby boy, his still face stark white wrapped in a white sheet, right before she threw him overboard.
Huong wrapped her arms around her shoulders and rocked in place. The healthy take care of the sick. A youth respects his elders. Older siblings take care of younger siblings. She consoled herself by repeating the chant but this time she added a fourth tenant. A parent passes before a child.
Huong freed her arms to wave to the boy. He waved back and then ran inside the climbing dome. When he poked his head out, she waved again. “Hello,” she said and smiled.
He stood before her and scratched his neck. Up close, he was much lighter-skinned than her boy. Her son had been the color of burnt caramel. Her sisters blamed it on the iced coffee she’d craved during her pregnancy. They said, “Thank god it’s a boy because a girl that color would have been cursed.” They called him bé trai café au lait. Four and Six thought the nickname was exceedingly smart. They even fought over who had coined it. Huong paid their bickering no mind. She was too busy loving his delicious smile and that candied skin.
The little boy who stood before her seemed like a sweet child. She didn’t know what to say to him and thought she could give him a gift. She reached for a lemon she’d picked but felt it inappropriate to give sour fruit to a child. Finally, she decided to give him her Vietnamese coin. The xu glinted in her palm.
The boy snatched it up and smirked. “You liking the money huh? You are a smart boy.” She tapped her temple and reached out to pet his glistening black hair. Her finger rested on the part at the center of his head. She held it there until she could feel warmth come through, and, with it, a strange sense of relief. It made her smile, causing her winter lips to rip. When she dabbed it, she saw blood on her fingertip. The boy’s eyes widened as if frightened. He examined her finger and then stepped back. He dropped his coin.
Huong said, “Take, take, you’re a smart boy, no problem.” She emphasized the o the way the Americans did on TV to accentuate the sounds of ease, a worry-free existence.
He eyed the coin on the ground.
“No problem,” she said again. He bent over and was about to reach for it