Hương 1990

The car purred like a tiger. A vague, blue, metal tiger. The salesman, a
người Việt—though Hương didn’t ask where he was from—named Vinh,
said it was a 1975 Oldsmobile Omega with a 4.3-liter V8 engine, a threespeed automatic, 170 horsepower—old but runs like a dream. A classic!
What this meant, Hương couldn’t tell. What she needed, she told Vinh,
was something to help her get around. She lived all the way out in New
Orleans East; everything else was over the bridge: the grocery stores, the nice
restaurants, work. She couldn’t keep on borrowing Bà Giang’s car.
When Vinh asked her where New Orleans East was, she said it was away
from the city—part of it yet not.
“An interesting place,” she said. “I live in Versailles. All of us are người
Việt; we all came after the war.” She guessed the man must be new in town.
She’d been seeing new người Việt coming to New Orleans, replacing those
who left for Houston or California.
“I don’t want anything fancy,” she added. “Something that is enough.”
“Chị,” he said, “you need something pretty and something that lasts long.
Something that can take you out of the city, out of the state, but also to work.
All in style.” He patted the car, then wiped his handprint.
“Bà Giang told me to come here and I won’t be cheated,” Hương said,
“but I’m seeing that I should take my business elsewhere.”
“Don’t say that, chị…” He took a step forward, so she took a step back.
“Hương. Tên tôi là Hương.”
“You can trust me, chị Hương. This runs like a dream. Would a fellow
người Việt deceive you?”
Yes, she thought, a fellow người Việt would deceive me.

“Let me take you for a ride,” the salesman added.
“It’s too fancy,” she said. “What’s a V8 engine? What’s that? Who needs
that? I just need a car. How about another one?” She couldn’t understand why
car shopping had to take so long, why someone couldn’t buy a car like they
would buy an apple or a bag of rice. All this chitchat. “What else have you
got?”
She took a tissue from her purse and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
After all this time working inside an air-conditioned nail salon, she was now
unaccustomed to the early July heat.
“This car is the perfect car for you, chị Hương. Why don’t you take it for a
ride? A ride around the block?”
“Does it have air-conditioning?” Hương asked.
“It does. The best cool air in America.” He waved the keys. A small smile
lit up his face.
—
First, Hương drove down small neighborhood roads, then onto Claiborne.
Vinh turned on the radio. “See, chị, this is the radio.”
He turned on the air-conditioning. “See, chị, this is the air-conditioning.”
He pressed down on the horn to show her its vitality, its strength and
loudness. “For when you’re stuck in traffic,” he said.
At one point, while he showed her the space in the glove compartment and
flipped through the car manual, she veered off onto a ramp and before she
knew it, most of the traffic disappeared. Hương saw a speed limit sign: sixtyfive miles an hour.
As Vinh rattled off more car specifications, the city faded from her
rearview mirror. Gone were the high buildings, the glass-windowed towers,
the concrete. Ten minutes more of driving, and it all disappeared.
A sense of happiness came over Hương as she realized this was the first
time in a long time she had left the city by herself. She reminded herself
there was more to the world than New Orleans, more than that city. She felt
she needed to celebrate as she crossed the city limits. She imagined leaving.
Her boys were off at school and they would come home and wait and she
would not be there! The next day they wouldn’t go to school. They would stay
home all week. They would fail their classes. The schools would visit. Not
finding her there, they would call. Ms. Trần, they’d say, how could you
abandon your sons? Yes, abandon, and all at once she felt guilty for thinking
it. How could she abandon her sons? How could she even think of doing that
to them? They were all alone in the world. She was just weary; that’s what it
was—tired, old, and weary.
“Anh Vinh,” Hương said, “which way back?”
“You’re doing just fine. Do you like the car? That sound you hear means
the engine is working great—just great!”
“Anh Vinh,” she repeated, “which way back?”
Vinh leaned over the center console and peered into Hương’s face and saw
the fear in her eyes of driving too far, too fast.
“Chị Hương,” he said. “Would you like some longans? They don’t sell
fresh longans here in the States very much, but there’s this woman…” He
paused and looked out the window, watching the signs pass by. “There’s this
woman in Buras. She owns an entire orchard of them, an entire orchard of
longan trees.”
Hương remembered the longan trees of her childhood. She remembered
the leaves blowing in a soft breeze, the inescapable fragrance hanging in the
air, the sound of rough fruit as it fell to the dirt with a muted thud. She hadn’t
thought about longans in years.
“Yes,” she said, at last. “Longans. Take me to the longan trees.”
—
The drive took over an hour. As she drove, her body sat stiff; she was afraid
she would be caught any minute. But the farther away they got, the more
relaxed she became. She drove with one hand and leaned back. After a half
hour of driving, the radio became static and the two started talking.
Hương told Vinh she was a professor’s wife. They, the Communists, called
for her husband. After his time in a reeducation camp, they migrated to the
countryside. Then they migrated out of the country, or at least that was the
plan.
Things got complicated after that. He got left behind as she sailed on. She
tried to contact him—she still kept her letters and cassette tapes in a shoebox
in her closet—but to no avail. One day, out of the blue, he did write back,
telling her to give up her search. At first, she was devastated. But Bà Giang
had a different perspective. She said the Communists were monitoring the
letters. Yes, Hương could agree on that—but what of it? Most likely, the old
woman said, they confiscated the letters and he never saw them, except for
the ones he did answer. Maybe, she went on, he stopped writing because he
was trying to protect himself; who knew what was going on over there across
the ocean, what happened after he sent Hương his final, brief postcard? In the
end, perhaps it was fate that they should never meet again. That didn’t
explain, however, Công’s long silence. If he was truly trying to get to her, get
to them, he would have written earlier, wouldn’t he? And then there was the
night they left. He had paused, she remembered. But perhaps Bà Giang was
right: the fates—or whatever force was behind the universe—must have had
something else in mind for their destinies. It didn’t make it hurt any less, any
of it. In fact, it made it hurt more: in the grand scheme of things they’d never
stood a chance.
Still, sometimes she wrote to him in the way a schoolgirl might write in a
diary; it calmed her, imagining talking to him, giving him her innermost
thoughts. Dear Công, Another day in New Orleans, she would scribble down.
Your sons are growing up so fast, fast as light, fast as seconds, you wouldn’t
recognize them because I don’t. They are not like you and I don’t know what to
do.
She didn’t say any of this to Vinh (he was a stranger, after all) and simply
said things got complicated. Life is already complicated, she said, and when
you add war to that, no one gets what they want.
Vinh agreed. He told Hương he’d been in the South Vietnamese Army.
“The South Vietnamese Amy,” he said, “was the best army there ever was
in the world.” After the war, they sent him to a reeducation camp. “When I
left Vietnam for good, I first went to Malaysia, then to Alaska, then Oregon,
then Texas, and now here!” He sounded like he wanted to say more, but
Hương didn’t urge him on. Besides, he told her they were almost there; just
take the next exit and get on Highway 11.
The trees on the highway gave way to flat wetlands, empty of everything
except water and mud. Hương felt the need to slow down—the land was
bereft, holy even—but Vinh said to keep up the speed.
When they came to an old trailer house, Vinh motioned her to stop, so
Hương parked the car and they got out.
Vinh walked leisurely as they passed the house and into the backyard. He
knew this place; he walked confidently and knew where he was going. Hương
tried not to slip in the mud as Vinh told her the woman who owned the
orchard was from the Philippines. She wondered how Vinh and the woman
knew each other.
In the backyard, to Hương’s surprise, trees stood in rows and rows,
everywhere. Her mouth opened in astonishment. There must have been
hundreds of them, and each stood heavy with leaves—and longans, bunches
of longans, hanging there among the leaves. She wanted to grab them all,
carry them in her arms, bring them home.
Vinh led her to a table and tent to the side of the orchard. The blue of the
tent made everything inside seem underwater. There, a small, elderly, brown
woman sat alone peeling longans. A radio played old jazz as she worked. The
woman looked up when they approached.
“Longans!” she said. “We have longans! So many!” Suntanned skin,
wrinkle lines, and small smiling eyes—she could have been someone’s
grandmother, someone’s great-grandmother, even.
“You back again!” the woman said to Vinh. The woman clapped and let
out a laugh. “I told you—longans really good! Good for health! Longevity!”
She looked at Hương and nodded her head. “You try longans?” she asked.
“Good for health! Longevity! Beauty! Here, here, here!” The old woman
picked up a longan and pushed her thumb into the fruit. Once the rough
exterior gave way, she began shucking the shell-like skin.
“See?” she said when all that was left was a thick white ball. She held it up
and turned it around like she was a showgirl on a game show—What a
wonderful fruit! A most gorgeous fruit! This fruit could be yours! She
reminded Hương of Vinh in the car lot.
“They called ‘dragon eyes’ because the seed—the seed big, black, shiny—
look like eye of dragon,” she said. She handed Hương the fruit.
From her hand, Hương could already smell the sweetness. She
remembered the subtle crunch it made when you bit into it, the feel of the
seed in the mouth, rolling like a marble on the tongue when all the flesh was
swallowed. Hương held it gently and bit into it slowly, wanting the flavor to
last, wanting to picture herself in an orchard, so very much like this one, on
the outskirts of Mỹ Tho, the hot, aching sun warming her neck, the juices of
the fruit cooling and giving her relief from the heat, a time that was simpler,
before war, before marriage, before the fall of a country….
She put the rest of the longan in her mouth and chewed.
What refreshment, she thought. What pleasure. What memory.
Vinh handed her a cluster of longans still hanging on their branch. She felt
their roughness, then his warm skin as it touched hers. She wanted to bring a
whole bag home, for Tuấn, who hadn’t had these in so long, and for Bình,
who never had.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, anh Vinh.”
—
Hương did not buy Vinh’s car. She decided on a cheaper one from the
dealership that sat across from his, but it wasn’t the last she saw of him.
One Saturday, she drove by to see if he was in. Coincidentally, he told her,
it was his lunch break, and she said she knew a sandwich place down on
Magazine Street, if that wasn’t too far. She said she could drive them there in
her new car.
At Casamento’s they both ordered oyster loafs and cans of Barq’s.
“This was the first American sandwich place I went to when I got here,”
she told Vinh. “We went out on a group lunch and I didn’t know what I was
getting. So imagine how surprised I was when they bring out this behemoth.”
She pointed to her own sandwich, two thick cuts of white bread trying to
contain a mountain of fried oysters. “It’s not the best sandwich I’ve ever had,
but it brings back memories. But don’t tell anyone here that.”
Vinh said he’d never been to any place that took food more seriously than
New Orleans. He said he once made the mistake of calling a muffuletta just a
sandwich, and the cashier—a petite-looking woman with a scratchy voice—
refused to give him his food.
Hương laughed. “Yes, that sounds about right.”
“Why here? Why New Orleans? Why stay?” Vinh asked.
“I could ask you the same question, anh Vinh,” Hương replied, and then,
“We just ended up here and we never left. But you, you’re a traveler, anh
Vinh. Why New Orleans?”
“I go where the jobs are,” he said. “Simple as that.”
There was more to that. Hương saw it in his eyes, as if he were waiting for
her to ask him to tell more. But she didn’t press him. She knew everyone had
their own pasts they wanted to leave behind. Not secrets, exactly, but
something to be guarded just the same, with some guarding it more urgently
than others. It gave her a vague feeling that they were the same type of
people.
After lunch, she drove him back.
Every weekend, somehow, she found herself on that side of town and he
was always working then, too. She drove them to her favorite places in New
Orleans—“Think of it as a welcome gift,” she said—and they alternated who
paid.
It was when they were strolling along the river walk, eating ice cream
cones, that she realized this had become her city, the place she lived but also
a place that lived in her. She’d picked up its vocabulary, developed a taste for
its foods, grown accustomed to its weather—the heat, the humidity, even the
minor hurricane here and there. She remembered how scared she was when
she first arrived, how she clutched her belongings (and her sons) close to her,
afraid that something might happen. Nowadays, she walked freely, unafraid.
Vinh pointed to the St. Louis Cathedral looming across the street. “It’s
been forever since I’ve been to a church,” he said. “I wasn’t raised with religion” was all Hương said. “Though everyone in
Versailles seems pretty religious. They even built their own church with
everything in Vietnamese—services, Bibles, pamphlets. But I don’t
understand.” If war had taught her one thing, it was that ideology—how you
believed the world should be, what you would die to uphold—was always
flawed, and though innocent on its own, it could lead to tragedy.
“For me it’s always been a private matter,” Vinh said as if feeling Hương’s
uneasiness.
“That’s all I ask,” she said. They had been quiet for a while when she said,
“They give tours. We can go.”
“No, that’s fine,” Vinh replied.
“If you want.”
“No, truly,” he said and took her hand.
Together they walked back to the car.
What kind of man are you, anh Vinh? Hương thought along the way but didn’t ask.