Reading for Winter Sundays
Fiction from Aimee Phan
A few weeks ago, in mid-December, I was out with a friend and happened to mention that so far the winter was treating me well and that I was finding much to like. To which my friend replied, with not a little acid in her voice, that we should talk again once the season had actually started. “December,” she pronounced, “is not winter.”
Well friends, winter seems to have officially arrived, at least for most of us living in the Northern Hemisphere. And I don’t know about you, but while cold is never my preferred temperature, I take comfort in adjusting my reading habits. Warm weather is a time for bringing books outdoors, whether on a park bench, a backyard, or near a pool. But what could possibly be better than reading in winter, ideally on a couch or in a bed, but sometimes just near a window with a view of what’s inhospitable outside?
This week’s reading is a piece of short fiction by the extraordinary Aimee Phan that was featured in our Vietnam guide. It’s a beautiful, powerful piece of writing. While it’s a great read any time of year, these cold days I recommend getting some sort of warm beverage in a mug, sitting somewhere comfortable, and letting yourself be transported.
Ferry between Haïphong and Along Bay. 1992. Photograph by Raymond Depardon/Magnum.
“The Poet’s Child,” Aimee Phan, Stranger’s Guide: Vietnam.
I never used to care for poetry. Our country was founded upon those overwrought, mewling words that got us into trouble for so many years, keeping us under the thumb of the Chinese and then the Westerners, who stoked and encouraged the melodrama of the arts for the purpose of keeping us weak. Feel with our hearts instead of think with our brains. And we fell for it: over and over again. Instead of fighting back against foreign invaders, the literature and music encouraged us to cry and to plead. Our national poem, for example? The ramblings of a weeping, beautiful, codependent whore. Why not whine and moan, when it sounds so pleasing to the ears?
But with the reunification, the new regime mercifully stripped away that extraneous language, expelling the books that had long deceived us and replacing the meandering nonsense with simple, concise information. The arts now had focus, a true purpose. We sang for the country. We chanted for strength. It was a relief. It was necessary. Our eyes cleared. We could finally be taken seriously, as our own people, masters of our fortune.
But while the literature was redacted, it did not disappear. Not entirely. The recalcitrants, the conquered, mainly the former elite Southerners still yearning for their delusions of luxurious, lazy privilege from the French, squirreled away their books under floorboards or inside their walls, next to the gold and other valuables they determined to withhold from their new government. My father argued that nostalgia was necessary to cope, a means of survival. I called it denial. I called it illegal and traitorous. But people will read what they want to read, whether or not it is true. Or memorize it, imprinting these fictional thoughts deep inside their memories, where they continue to trump reason and discount reality.
That was what my father did. Despite his lifelong devotion to the party, a member practically since birth, he harbored a soft spot for the melodramatic love songs. He whistled the melodies during chores, hummed them under his breath while drinking tea or reading the newspaper. He meticulously maintained vinyl records, then cassette tapes, and then compact discs of his cherished singers, and made sure to carefully pack these albums when we moved south. I was 14 when we relocated from the tranquility of my childhood home of Haiphong to the polluted excess of Hồ Chí Minh City so my father could accept a promotion in the education and training ministry.
His mandate was to reform the primary and secondary education curriculum. One of his first tasks was to purge the libraries and schools of corrupt Western propaganda and restock the shelves with robust, efficient teaching materials. This meant most of the history, economics and Western philosophy texts. Most of the literature. All of the dreadful poetry.
But as my father stared at the discarded literature in the dump trucks, realizing that so many words of his literary childhood would burn and crumble to ash, his sentimentality prevailed. He rescued one adolescent favorite from the pile, and another, and another, until he found himself holding a carton full of books after the trucks pulled away.
As a high-ranking official, no one objected or even questioned his motives. Brother Anh was above such superficial influences as Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Lolita (you have to wonder: again with the whores? How many stories of their disgraces and excuses did we need?)
“You haven’t even read them,” my father said, when I tossed them back into the box.
“Isn’t that why they’re banned? Because they’re worthless?”
“We removed the literature that could provoke or unduly influence the impressionable masses,” he said. “But you are smarter than the masses.”
He dug through the box until his face brightened, and he placed a tattered selection in my hands. The cover had been ripped off, the spine barely clinging to the pages. A poetry collection. Love poems. A silhouette of two entwined hands embossed on the cover.
“Don’t make that face,” he said. “Your brain could use some splendor.”
“Science is beautiful,” I said. “And so is math.”
“But can equations make you cry?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Rest that smart mouth, darling daughter,” he said. “You’ve always listened to me when it mattered, and this matters. This book will change you, I promise.”
He was right about the listening part. All the achievements and successes in my short life were guided by his patience and wisdom, and his alone. After my mother’s passing when I was five, he raised me by himself, without complaint, bitterness or even a modicum of regret. How he could make our tiny family of two feel like the most joyous gift is a trait I still hope to inherit.
I tossed the book into my morning reading basket on the back stoop along with his other recommendations, the books my father believed could nurture my compassion, which he feared had been stifled by my rigid school teachers. I preferred to leave the poetry at home, to avoid nosy questions or tedious assumptions from my classmates.
In the mornings, while most of the city yawned and stretched before another day of productivity, I sat in the alley at our patio table with the book and my morning coffee.
The silly book caught Lac’s attention, unlike any of my previous reading material. Squatting amongst the oily gears and machinery parts of his motorbike, our neighbor was on a never-ending mission to rebuild its engine. He had been fiddling with the crucial components of the motorbike ever since we had moved to the neighborhood. I don’t ever remember hearing the bike stutter, yet he remained faithful to its potential resurrection, his attention focused on those disparate parts and nothing else.
Until that day.
“What is that?”
My eyes drifted up, recognizing the deep, clear voice, though he’d never before directed it at me. A warmth flooded my cheeks. I had no doubt whom the question was for.
Perhaps he’d heard me unconsciously groan or wince at some of the verses I’d been reading. It was a particularly painful poem that hit all the vices: thwarted love, declarations of agony, suicide.
“Just poetry,” I said, tapping the book against the table, suddenly aware that I hadn’t combed my hair or rinsed my face that morning. I wore a faded gray T-shirt and shorts, with bare feet and unpolished toenails. I’d grown used to him looking beyond me, so his attention caught me off guard.
“I thought your focus was biology,” he said.
I’d never told him that. Our parents must have chatted, a brief exchange of their children’s statuses, a feeble attempt to bond.
“I have other interests,” I said. Why did I sound so defensive?
He laughed. “I’m glad. I love poetry. My mother used to read poems to us at bedtime.”
“Probably not these,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I said, my heart racing, realizing I was in the midst of the longest conversation I’d ever had with our neighbor, “these are old. And romantic. Irrelevant.”
“My favorite kind!” He said, smiling, revealing remarkably even teeth. “Why don’t you read some to me?”
I tried not to stare. He wore a dark blue tank top and gray athletic pants in the mornings, a cotton sweatband around his head. After his morning grunt work, he went inside, where he presumably showered, eventually reemerging in a tight-fitting shirt and jeans to meet his friends in the alley behind our houses. They were boisterous and disruptive with their conversation and laughter, especially the girls.
“Or I could turn the radio back on,” he said, after some silence. “But I’d like to hear what you’re reading.”
Hoping the verses might sound better outside of my head, I obliged. And to more prudently consider these words I initially found imprecise, at times repugnant, I read only three poems at a time. I’d never read aloud much, so it surprised me how the slow pacing and articulation brought a different meaning to the silly, trite words, so they did not seem so silly or trite, but actually emotional and, occasionally, profound.
I also realized, with irritation, that my voice could grow high-pitched and tinny for extended readings, not unlike Lac’s girlfriends, the ones I found so grating and superficial. When it reached this level, I cleared my throat, aiming to return to a reasonable tenor. I was not some swoony, giggly teenager, even if his concentrated gaze and faint smile inspired dizziness and distraction.
But as I became immersed in the verses, I stopped worrying about this and, hopefully, he did, too. It felt sweet to have a book between us, a task to perform in his company.
Before these poetry readings, we never said much to each other, though we often spent our mornings together in the alley. Our relationship, however tenuous it was, had begun with suspicion, entirely on his part, though later, I’d realize he reflected the consensus of the neighborhood, populated with many Southern families who’d lived in the area for generations.
“The Trans were good people,” Lac said to us, the day after we moved in. The first time I saw him hunched over that motorbike. His scowl made my spine straighten, my fingers curl, and I instantly despised myself for initially admiring his hooded eyes, which then seemed only to glower at us. “They did not deserve to be evicted.”
My father bore the enormous humility of publicly apologizing to those ignorant, judgmental neighbors, explaining the obvious: that he never knew our house’s former occupants He brushed away my protests. “We need to be compassionate,” my father reminded me inside the cruddy walls of our new home.
“But we didn’t do anything wrong!” Still overwhelmed by the many boxes around us, I longed for our former home in Haiphong and the rational, educated friends and community we’d left behind.
“We are no longer in the North,” my father said. “There are many here still mourning their losses.”
And while I wanted to remind him that the country had been reunited for 10 years, I realized my father’s patience and empathy were key to eventually winning over our new neighbors or, at the very least, elicit superficial politeness. They all knew how influential my father was. How imprudent it was to make him an enemy. Every morning, they watched him leave his house in his ministry attire and me in my youth league uniform. But unlike his comrades, my father never gloated over the losers. Such impulses were beneath the sweetest, kindest man. The party was fortunate to have him on their side. And though I bemoaned every sweat-soaked summer in the urban hell formerly known as Saigon, I understood the government’s wisdom in assigning him to this position.
He had the ineffable quality of always finding the best in the worst people. He’d withstand your insults, your sneers, your rejections, until you realized he wasn’t going to leave. He would listen. He would help. If anyone could redeem the corrupt Southerners from their ignorance and lift them up and experience true consciousness, it was him.
Where did he learn such tolerance and patience? How did he endure? The books line our shelves. They overflow from my reading basket.
So perhaps in searching for my empathy, Lac could find his as well. We could embark on this self-discovery together. I started reading the poems while he worked on his motorbike, lavish testimonies of passion, adoration, but also loss, suffering, pain. Most of them ended in misery. The final lines could leave you devastated. I found myself holding my breath as long as he did, absorbing the words, imagining the despair. The speakers grieved as deeply as they loved.
Eventually, Lac stopped tinkering with his bike so he could focus on the poems. Then, to better listen, he pulled his stool closer and closer until, finally, our chair legs touched. I could smell the soap from his body. See the flints of brown and orange in his hair. How he held his breath for some of the best lines, then exhaled. Some mornings, I imagined I could see his breath, but that was impossible. It was too hot and humid that time of year. It was just what I wanted to see.
“Your face changes when you read,” he said once, unexpectedly. “It’s nice to look at.”
A flare of irritation bloomed inside of me. “Meaning I’m usually not?”
“No,” he said, that easy smile returning, disarming me. “It just makes it easier to enjoy it.”
“Do you want to try it?” I offered, holding the book in the air between us. “I can listen to you read.”
He shook his head, sitting back, pulling away from me. At first, I thought I’d done something wrong, that he was angry with me, until the sweet expression returned. “You’re better at it than I am.”
“How do you know?”
“You don’t just sound like you’re reading. It’s like you understand them. I can hear the lovers in your voice.”
I wondered if he was teasing me. How could I sound like these starry-eyed dreamers? When we first started reading them together, I couldn’t help but get irritated by the familiar pattern. They meet, they love, then either death, another lover, or a family obligation tears them apart.
I commented ruefully after a particularly bad one that they could have saved themselves years of heartache if they’d simply stayed home.
“What’s the fun in that?” Lac asked.
“I enjoy being home,” I said. “I study, I talk to my father. It’s better than going out and finding a way to ruin my life.”
“Do you really think their lives are ruined?” he asked. “Do you think love ruins people?”
“I certainly see that in everything we’ve read.”
“But that’s why it’s so beautiful,” Lac said. “Their highs are as great as their lows. Their suffering is worthwhile.”
“I disagree. I don’t think suffering is required for happiness and fulfillment.”
“We cannot live our lives afraid of the ending. It’s coming, no matter what. But I’d like to look back on my life and the choices I’ve made with heartache rather than regret. Because I will know that I did something. I tried.”
We had frequent disagreements, but they were not contentious. He was too gentle to really argue, and he seemed to enjoy our debates. Like when we learned our neighbors—the Nguyens—down the street had been arrested, yet again, for trying to escape the country. They’d tried to bribe a smuggler, who was working undercover with the police.
“When are they going to learn?” I murmured, as the Ba Nguyen wailed in the alley with her grandchildren, mourning the imprisonment of her son and daughter-in-law. “All this work and struggle to escape, when they can just put that effort into rebuilding their lives here.”
“Now who’s the optimist?” Lac said.
“Our parents and the generations before us fought for us to have our own country back,” I said. “And they want to go running back to their colonizers? They have no hope in their own people, only outsiders.”
“If they didn’t have hope,” Lac said, “they’d never leave.”
For all the airs the Southerners flaunted from their past lives as colonized peasants of the French and Americans, they still had severe deficiencies in need of correction, education being the most dire. Because while they memorized the songs and spoke the romantic languages of their invaders, their talents typically halted at their banter.
Lac demonstrated this to me one morning. At that point in our readings, he sat next to me at the patio table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, leaving his fractured motorbike engine neglected on the alley ground, while he listened and exhaled to my words, his puffs in sync with the stanza breaks of each poem. Our shoulders settled against each other comfortably, soft, warm, despite the climate’s typical humidity. The sunlight sprayed through his hair so it sparkled bronze, and I kept glancing up, distracted by this unusual coloring and how the silver smoke from his lips illuminated his symmetrical nose and sculpted cheeks.
I shouldn’t have tried to turn the page while so distracted, but I did, knocking over my coffee mug. I pushed the book at him, so that I could try to catch the liquid before it reached us. When I looked up to apologize, he was holding the book upside down.
Before I could stop myself, I asked, “Do you know how to read?”
Instead of acknowledging the shame spreading across his face, the slump in his shoulders, I am ashamed to admit, I laughed. I don’t think I was laughing at him, because that would have been unkind, cruel, and I’m not a cruel person. But maybe I was nervous, and unsure of what to do or say. Because what could you say, when a person you’ve admired, thought about constantly for months, revealed something so unexpected and—I’ll just say it—so denigrating to his character?
Of course, he assumed the worst of me. He recoiled, pushing back in his stool, the wood against wood squeaking, stuttering beneath us. And naturally, I could not even apologize or say anything to make him feel better. I did not inherit my father’s gift. So I did the only thing I could.
I left. Muttering an excuse about needing to help my father, I turned and walked back into my house, up the three steps from the alley to the kitchen, closing the door, so that he wouldn’t be subjected to the sight of my stupid, arrogant face any longer.
I pressed my ear against the door, listening for movement, hoping for something. He needed to leave. Or stay. Maybe he could exhibit the humanity that I so clearly lacked. He could come up to the door, knock, and I’d open it, and he would forgive me.
But that is a fantasy you’d only find in a silly love poem. A few minutes later, when I cracked open our back door, I saw that he’d perched the book on top of the patio table. One of his oil rags had absorbed my coffee spill. In return, I laundered his rag and left it neatly folded on his family’s back stoop the next morning, but I lacked the courage to remain outside. I spent the following week indoors for breakfast, using our front door to go to school. And once I’d gotten into that habit, I couldn’t muster the nerve to return to our alley again.
Perhaps it didn’t matter. We were five pages from the end of the anthology, a journey we would never complete. It was an amusing activity for the 17 days we had, but it never would have sustained another book or another shared pleasure together. These types of indulgence, so surprising and immeasurably lovely, never do.
A few months later—I do not know the exact date, because by then, I’d perfected my routine of cowardice—Lac disappeared, along with his family.
Some of the neighbors believed that the Buis had moved to Ca Mau, where Lac’s mother had relatives, but others whispered that the family had taken a boat out of the country. They spoke about it with wistfulness, jealousy, admiration for their risk, while I only imagined Lac, his painfully beautiful face, his lean, muscular back, decomposing at the bottom of the South China Sea. I did not want to, but I remembered my father’s stories about the statistics of escapes on a dilapidated boat carrying hundreds of desperate passengers. So many Southerners believed an easier life was only a boat ride away, not considering the thousands of miles they’d have to cross before that was even possible. If only they’d consulted a map instead of a fortune teller before dreaming of their impending mass suicide. If only they could read one.
A few weeks later, I couldn’t find the poetry book. I thought I’d misplaced it somewhere. I swept through the house, checking behind the books on our shelves, in the various baskets and surfaces. While I searched, I imagined it sitting in Lac’s hands, his tanned fingers tracing the words, as the boat bobbed along the waves.
Would he find another passenger to read them to him? Would she teach him to read? Would their heads bend toward each other, sharing in those ecstasies and tragedies as we once had?
These were silly questions, fantasies from my own boredom and desperation. The book reappeared in my reading basket, the spine repaired with a plain red cover. My father had taken the anthology to a bookshop to have it recovered.
“If you were going to spend so much time with it, I wanted it to last,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you it would change you? Did it make you cry?”