Hương and her sons had been in the country for only a month, but already
they were having problems.
Their sponsor, a white Catholic priest, paired them with the Minhs.
“Both thirty-two,” he said while driving. “You will like them.”
The priest—she never remembered his name—was old and serious and
restrained. He walked with his hands behind his back as he took long,
sweeping strides and had a habit of keeping his head slightly bent forward as
if he were listening to something everyone else could not hear, giving him a
look of arrogant superiority. He reminded her of the priests who came to her
childhood village with hard European candies and boxes of Bibles in hopes of
converting someone in their bad Vietnamese. She remembered one priest
who couldn’t pronounce bạn and instead said bàn, and they made fun of him
behind his back, calling him Father Table. Still, Hương did not not like this
New Orleans priest. She was lucky, she told herself. She was alive. She made
it to America.
The priest took an exit onto another highway. He didn’t use his blinker.
They had been on and off highways all morning, dropping off other
“refugees”—the word still felt strange in her mouth, in her mind—at
temporary homes. Earlier that morning, the priest dropped off a couple from
Vũng Tàu at a tall building. Then a single Saigonese girl at a short house
painted pink. Another family of three was given to an American fisherman
and his wife, and they greeted each other with hugs as if they had known each
other all their lives; the wife gave their son a pink stuffed elephant. Hương
and her boys were the last to be dropped off. Bình slept in an infant seat as Tuấn kneeled by the window and watched as
the world slipped by, pointing and calling out the names of everything he saw:
xe hơi, xe đạp, cây, nhà. What Hương noticed the most was the concrete—
the buildings, the roads, the sidewalks, the fountains, the statues. So much
concrete, she thought. She imagined them rubbing against her, scraping her
knees and hands, leaving bruises and scrapes and marks. She was thinking
that way nowadays: what can hurt her, what can leave a scar.
The priest turned onto a road, and just like that, the hardness of the city
disappeared, replaced by flat plots of parched grass and a traffic light. Beyond
that, a billboard advertised a deep red sausage with rice grains inside.
As they waited, the priest glanced up into his rearview mirror and smiled.
“Gần tới rới,” he said, Almost there, in an accent Hương found oddly
charming, like the way the Australian English teachers at the refugee camp
spoke, and that gave her something to latch on to, a type of comfort. The van
continued down the long stretch of road for another five minutes before
slowing down into a turn. In front of a house, a fat Vietnamese man waited.
“Mr. Minh!” the priest chuckled. Mr. Minh waved when he saw them.
“Welcome to America!” Mr. Minh shouted as the priest parked the car.
He pulled the door open and bowed extravagantly, making a show of the
gesture. His large hands came at her next and grabbed her wrists. He shook
them furiously. “Chị will like it here very much!” he said. “It’s America!
We’re all friends here!” His face glowed red. How unlike her husband he was.
Công was thin and suave, bookish and reserved, and, above all, neat; this man
was chubby and rude, drunk and loud—above all, loud. She could have
pictured Mr. Minh spending his time at bars and his poor wife coming to get
him at three in the morning. She thought, not without bitterness, that they
never would have been friends in Vietnam. They were two different types of
people; a friendship had little chance.
“We’re all friends here!” Mr. Minh repeated, confidently, caressing her
sloppily, stupidly. It made Hương feel little, like a bug waiting to be squashed.
She held on to her baby boy and motioned for her other son to stand closer.
The wife—Hương noticed her now—stood aside as if this were the regular
order of things. “He used to be a police officer,” the wife said in her scratchy voice. “Now,
he drinks!” She laughed and Hương didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh
out of courtesy or just nod sadly in agreement. She decided on doing neither
and stayed silent and stiff.
“Very well,” the wife said. Then, in English, she said something to the
priest, shook his hand, and grabbed Hương’s suitcase. The priest drove away.
“This way,” she said.
Hương walked up the porch steps and crossed the threshold. Right away,
she smelled the rotting wood, disarming at first but only because it came so
suddenly. The lights were off, and in the darkness, the room felt vast and
empty. As her eyes adjusted, she realized the room was small and arranged at
its center were a floral fabric sofa, a white plastic chair, and a small television.
A fan spun lazily above.
The wife told Hương it was called a “shotgun house.” Ngôi nhà súng, she
clarified. “See?” she said. She placed the suitcase down and mimed the shape
of a gun with one hand. With her other, she held her wrist. Closing one eye,
she looked through an invisible scope and the appearance of intense
concentration fell onto her face. For a few seconds, she stood silently, so
focused on something in the distance that Hương looked toward where the
wife stared, too. Then “Psssh!”—the imitated sound of gunfire. It was so
unexpected but also so childish. Hương jumped back and felt stupid for doing
so. Like a child tricked in a schoolyard, she immediately hated the Minhs,
their poverty, their obnoxiousness, their immaturity.
“See?” the wife said. “A house for guns.” She made the motion of dusting
off her hands. “But you don’t have to worry about that here. No war, not here,
not ever.”
“Of course,” said Hương, composing herself.
“That’s all in the past now,” the wife said.
“Yes,” said Hương, “the past.”
“Just stay out of the doorways to be on the safe side.” She broke out into a
cackle, though Hương didn’t find any of it funny. Nothing in America was
funny. Mrs. Minh’s tricks weren’t funny, their situation as người Việt wasn’t funny, and Hương felt outraged that people like the Minhs should even think
about laughing.
“Let me show you more,” said the wife. She led Hương through the
doorways and into the kitchen and the couple’s bedroom in the back. “You’ll
sleep up front. The phòng khách,” said Mrs. Minh.
The next morning, the priest arrived to take Hương downtown, dropping
her off at the church. Before coming to America, Hương had never been
inside a church. In Mỹ Tho there was none. In Saigon, only a handful. But
here they were everywhere, and all the other Vietnamese seemed grateful for
that. The first few weeks, as they slept in the pews, they seemed at peace.
Hương, for her part, slept uneasily under the watch of the statue of Jesus on
the cross. His sad, pleading eyes made her want to cross herself like all the
other Catholics did. She knew Công would have laughed at her for it, so she
didn’t.
“Here,” the priest said before letting her go. He tore out a sheet of yellow
paper from a legal pad he carried everywhere. For the last week they had
been finding her a job. “Because you need money to survive in New Orleans,”
he said as if he thought life in other countries were any different. They had
often gone out in groups, but today was her first day alone. Franklin’s
Seafood, said one line, followed by an address. Poydras Street Dry Cleaners,
said another.
“Franklin’s looking for cashiers,” he said, “and Poydras a clothes folder.
Oh, and…” He wrote something else down and gave another sheet to Hương.
“Be on the lookout for signs that say .” She held the loose sheet of
paper and sounded out the word with her lips.
“Hi-Ring,” she whispered.
“Hi-er-ing,” he said.
“Hi-yering.”
“Hi-er-ing.” Hương mouthed the words and folded the paper away. The
priest gave her directions and she was on her way, pushing the stroller she’d
borrowed from the church for Bình with one hand and leading Tuấn with the
other. By the time she was on Magazine Street, she looked up and wondered
how a city could be so empty. Down one way, a driver had parked his school bus and was reading the newspaper and eating a doughnut. Down another,
two women talked to each other in smart business skirts.
As she walked, Hương reached into her purse for a pocket-sized notebook,
a gift from the church. Từ vựng căn bản, she had written at the top of the first
page, followed by the phrases she had remembered from her English lessons:
Hello.
How are you?
I am fine.
Thank you.
She practiced the words aloud, repeating them in whispers, analyzing the
pronunciation, the tones. English was such a strange language. Whereas in
Vietnamese, the words told you how they wanted to be pronounced, in
English the words remained shrouded in mystery.
She scanned the priest’s list, then returned to the notebook. So many
words, so many ideas, so many meanings. If only Công could see her now!
She imagined that she spoke English the way he spoke French, like he was
born there. She saw them sitting together on a porch looking out on a garden
—maybe like one of the gardens she’d passed here in New Orleans, with
immaculate flower beds and sprinklers and birdbaths—and she’s holding up
the words, helping him pronounce them. What she would tell him then, when
they were settled, successful, American, reminiscing of all that life threw at
them, the improbability of their survival, and yet nonetheless…
Suddenly, Tuấn pulled her arm.
“Look!” he said. “A cat!”
“Tuấn!” Hương grabbed him before he stepped into the street. A car
passed by. A horn sounded.
“But it was a cat,” her son said, “and it wasn’t like any other cat. Didn’t
you see it?”
“Stay with mẹ,” she said.
They walked two more blocks before finding the first address on the list. A
cartoon fish with huge eyes stared back at her from a tin sign. Leaning her
forehead against the glass, she peered inside and imagined herself holding a
tray of drinks and chatting with customers. A girl at the front counter waved at Hương to get her attention. When
Hương didn’t come in, the girl came to the door and asked her something she
couldn’t understand. Hương reached for the notebook in her purse then, but it
was gone. A sense of panic came over her. After emptying everything into
her hands, she realized she must have dropped it while Tuấn was running into
the street. She found the note the priest gave her—there at the bottom of her
purse, a piece of shining gold—and handed it over.
“Please,” Hương said in an almost whisper, unsure if it meant làm ơn.
Surely, it meant làm ơn! She forced a smile and hoped it didn’t appear too
eager. Then she stopped smiling altogether to avoid any possibility of looking
desperate. She remembered the women in their business suits. How confident
they were. How successful.
The girl looked at the word, then at Hương. She did this several times,
confused. “No,” the girl said. “No,” she said again, this time more forceful,
like the word was a pebble and she was flicking it toward what must have
been a strange Vietnamese woman, a woman who did not belong here, a
foreigner. “Do you want to eat?” the girl continued, slow and loud. “We serve
food. Do you want to eat?”
“Eat?” Hương asked. She didn’t know what that meant. It sounded like a
hiccup, one that you tried to suppress. Eat! Eat! Eat! What was the girl
talking about?
The girl became impatient, angry even, pointing inside, where people were
enjoying their grotesquely large meals.
“I am sorry,” Hương said, giving up, using the phrase she knew by heart: I
am sorry. It was a good phrase to know. This was what the Australian English
teachers taught her at the refugee camp. I am sorry for what happened.
Before the girl could say anything else, Hương turned around and walked
away with a steady stride. She didn’t know what had just happened, but she
felt, in the pit of her stomach, that she had done something wrong. The last
thing she saw on the girl’s face was a grimace. She was being told, she was
sure, that she had done something rude, against the country’s laws. They
would arrest her. They would arrest a woman and her children for not
knowing the rules. Would they even let her stay because she was arrested? What would happen to them all then? They crossed the street and took
another corner. She walked faster.
“Mẹ, what’s wrong?” Tuấn asked. He looked back toward where they had
come from.
“Don’t look back,” said Hương. She pushed the stroller and led Tuấn
away. “Don’t you look.”
Suddenly, she noticed, all around her people were talking. There were
couples talking, groups talking, children talking, a woman held a dog in her
arms and she, too, was talking to that small animal. Yet the words they were
saying didn’t make any sense. She repeated the words she knew in her head, a
chaotic mantra of foreign sounds that contorted her mouth comically,
strangely, like a puppet’s—Yes, no, thank you, please, yes, no, sorry, hello,
goodbye, no, sorry. The important part was to keep moving. She knew that
much. She saw a fenced-in and empty park across the street and without
looking ran toward it, but before she reached the gate, a man with beads
around his neck and oversized sunglasses bumped into her. She could smell
the alcohol on him. All of a sudden, the whole city smelled of alcohol and
everyone everywhere was drinking and smiling and laughing. What was
wrong with these people? What was wrong with this place?
She turned back and was stepping into the street, pushing the stroller with
both hands, when a car slammed its brakes and the driver pressed down on
his horn. It stopped before hitting her or the stroller. She looked down at her
shaking hands: she had let go. In the surprise of the car coming and its horn
sounding, so suddenly and so loudly—she had let go. The first sign of danger
and her first instinct was to let go and she’d nearly killed her son and the man
pressed down on his horn again and she realized she was still in the middle of
the street and she felt ashamed, the most shame she’d ever felt in her life. She
held back tears, but Bình cried. She clasped the handlebar of the stroller
more tightly.
“Stupid fucking lady!” the driver screamed.
“What did he say?” Tuấn asked.
“Let’s go home,” she replied. “He said we should go home.” They crossed
the street and headed down another. “But home is so far away,” said her son. “I’m tired.”
“What?” She had forgotten what she told him. She looked around for
anything that might have been familiar.
“Home is far away,” her son repeated.
“I know,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I know.”