Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

AND NOW THEY WERE STOPPING. EVERYWHERE PEOPLE MADE camp in the road. It was well past midnight, the noise of a million displaced voices and the full moon like an eye over the world. Huyen massaged the back of her skull with her fingers. If she kept her eyes focused in the middle distance, the headache was bearable. All over the highway campfires blazed like the fires of an army. Some of the travelers looked as if they had been on the road their whole lives. She wondered if, when the time came, they would know how to stop.

Qui piled their bamboo mats one on top of another and laid Bà out, folding the mosquito net on top of her. She picked up the baby and opened her shirt. A young boy in a group on the edge of the road sat watching, his eyes black as holes. Qui wasn’t sure if it was hunger or curiosity or something darker that made him stare.

Huyen spit some chewed rice into her palm. She tried to feed it to Bà, but the old woman wouldn’t open her mouth, her eyes snowy. A man was picking his way up the road carrying an armful of dried brush. He stopped and stared at Qui before peering at Bà lying in the moonlight. She’ll be dead by morning, he said, without any inflection. Huyen had thought he might offer some of the brush to build a fire, but he didn’t.

Hours later she nudged Qui. Most of the fires along the highway had burned out. It’s time, she said. She lifted Rabbit up off of Qui’s stomach where the baby had been sleeping and put her down next to Bà. Say goodbye.

Overhead something fluttered through the darkness. Rabbit rubbed her ears. The world went black like the moment before a curtain lifts. Gingerly she put her tiny hands on her grandmother’s face. Through the fabric of the old woman’s shirt she brushed the spot with her lips where Bà’s scar gleamed next to her heart. A dog barked in the distance and then a flash and then everything, Bà’s life spooling into her granddaughter in the span of a human kiss.

Lady, your face is growing wet. A light mist slicks your cheeks, but it’s not rain, the sun peeking through the haze. Lightly you run a finger over your forehead and stick it in your mouth. Salt. Spindrift. You begin to recognize the soft sting in your nostrils, the world listing at five degrees. Then you realize it’s not music filling the air so much as the cries of seabirds.

A sudden splash. A body hits the water, then another before a gun is fired into the air. In the sky the line of little white birds riding the winds parts for just the briefest of moments before re-forming. You watch as the man with the gun takes aim at two dark shapes in the water, the shapes paddling furiously. Another few shots and they stop moving and sink below the surface. For the rest of the short journey south nobody else jumps overboard even though the ship never leaves sight of land.

The day began on a quay, an interminable line slugging forward. People standing in the hot sun waiting for their turn to make their mark on a piece of paper, lines organized by place of origin. Ha Nam. Nam Dinh. Ninh Binh. At the head of each line there is an agent and a doctor from the company who looks at both sides of the hands and pries the mouth open, searching for signs of fever because, aside from fever, everything else is acceptable.

A recruiter walks among the lines saying it will be the easiest three years of your life. He is missing his left index finger all the way down to the knuckle. You notice this and everything there is to see. Your eyes are clear as gems. You try not to stare as he says something about free medicine, thirty pounds of rice a month, eight-hour work shifts, and the company will pay to bring you right back here, repatriate you in the land of your ancestors with money in your pocket.

All over the quay large men stand around holding rattan canes as if the foot-long sticks were nothing more than fancy pointers used to direct traffic. Some of the men are foreign, ex-members of the French Foreign Legion, their faces etched by sun and swifter sharper things. Some of them stare openly at the women. One scratches the black stubble of his chin with his cane as if that’s all he ever does with it. Already you are learning that order is something the company must maintain at all times, and that it is the job of these men to do so at any cost.

Two hours and then you’re up. How old, says the agent. Your mother looks at you as if he’s asked for your weight, something she needs to consider. She reaches over and brushes a strand of hair from your face. Thuan is fourteen, your mother says, her voice smoothing over the lie. The truth is you were born in 1930, and you will be ten in the fall, your eyes clear as water, but as you are learning, women are mercurial. Tell a man what he wants to hear and he will see whatever you tell him. The agent plunks down a contract. Sign here, he says. You take up the plume and dip it in the inkwell, draw the small square with the two lines that partition it like a rice paddy, the symbol of your clan. Your mother looks on. There isn’t even hope in her eyes, just resignation. A mother and a daughter, their hunger like a bond between them.

What your mother doesn’t know. The agent doesn’t care how old you are. He gets paid three xu for every signature he collects.

It’s a good place for a family, the agent says. The company will look after you. Your mother wonders why, now that he has your signatures, the agent keeps spinning his lies. Everyone else from Nam Dinh headed south years ago, and none of them have come back, though everyone in Nam Dinh knows what happens down on the plantations. They went for the same reason your mother has decided to make the move. There is simply nowhere else to go. Even the rats in Nam Dinh are scarce. War is settling on all the continents of the known world, and rubber is the dark currency that makes it all possible.

Another three hours and the processing is done. One of the company’s men moves from line to line collecting the contracts, filing them in a brown binder that you will never see again. Each person who signed was promised ten dong just for signing, though the workers from Ha Nam have the lowest rates of literacy. Even before boarding Le Cheval , which will take you all south into hell, the people from Ha Nam will be swindled out of four dong , a fact they will come to find out in the days ahead, though there is nothing they can do about it.

On board you are given a shabby mat and told in French to find space on deck. The sailor who tells you this speaks like a native, but his skin is dark as earth. Le Cheval is full of ore; you are just a secondary cargo. The food from the galley is inedible, the rice filled with sand, the fish already rotting. Once out at sea, people eye the railing but in their hearts everyone knows it is too late.

This is all you remember of the boat ride down the Vietnamese coast in the land the French call Indochine: the little white birds trailing the ship, the night sky as if salted with stars. How a man from Ninh Binh demanded drinkable water and was hit on the head only once, though the blood came down out of his scalp as if he’d been beaten again and again. On the third night a man and a woman lay writhing on their small square mat while everyone else slept, the man with his hand over the woman’s mouth, and the cords in her neck either straining with pain or something you can’t fathom.

On the fourth day the seabirds have doubled in number, land close enough even the weakest swimmer could make it. By the time Le Cheval sails into port, your mother has already finished her daily implorations to the goddess. Lady, keep us safe. Lift up our hearts in the darkness.

Once the ship docks, chaos breaks out when a foreigner boards and begins beating the air in front of him with his cane for no apparent reason. Partez! Partez! A woman falls clutching her head. It takes another hour to sort things out. All over the splintery wooden boards of the pier you notice rusty stains that theoretically could be anything.