Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

Great-Great-Grandfather gave himself a year. Each night he opened the box his mother had handed him and unwrapped the soft cloth, kissing the shriveled skin and holding them up to the starlight in his palms. In the purple light of the North Star, the skin looked fleshy again, warm to the touch.

It happened one year to the day after Great-Great-Grandmother had first noticed his look in the mirror. At the same hour of the same day they lay together for the first and only time. It was she who beckoned him into her chambers, she who lay down on her back on the red and black silk duvet and pulled him into her, whispering have you wanted it enough? The room filled with a soft purple light. In the window the stars salted the sky. For both of them the pleasure was as it should be, Great-Great-Grandfather gasping at the simplicity of it. That you could want something badly enough and your disfigured body could respond.

When Great-Great-Grandmother began to show, she cloaked herself in rich tunics, the fabric enough to clothe ten women. The one who would become emperor never noticed, his mind full of other things, the empress dowager and the regents plotting for power. He never noticed the changes in his concubine’s weight even in the brief moments when he was with the girl with the redolent feet, her body swelling and then unswelling months later, her breasts loose with milk. Her lover never noticed even through August of 1883 when he became the sixth emperor of Vietnam, the Son of Heaven, his emperorship lasting only four months.

In the end the French navy was too much. At the signing ceremony, he could feel his ancestors crowding the room. What choice did he have? The French had made it clear they would keep blockading the Perfume River, bombarding the coast. His signature felt like ashes in his mouth. Sign and become a French protectorate or be destroyed.

What an emperor will do for his people, keeping them from the worst possible harm. Even when his imperial court turns on him. Even when his own regents demand it. In the end you do what you have to do and you do it with honor. The Son of Heaven lifted the cup and drank. Opium and vinegar. Like so many emperors before him, he felt the poison burn all the way down.

But the story doesn’t stop with the suicide of the emperor. In the days that follow the entire household is killed, all those loyal to the Son of Heaven. They say my great-great-grandparents drank from the same cup, Great-Great-Grandmother tottering to the spot on her own two feet when their turn came, Great-Great-Grandfather standing beside her with his treasure tucked away in a small velvet bag hung around his neck. The sudden realization as the poison aerated his blood that he’d always been whole.

With her finger Tao lightly traced the outline of the moon on the window. But their daughter, my great-grandmother, had been smuggled out of the palace months before, she said. My great-grandmother, a little girl with a stony face and the sweetest-smelling feet. She was raised in an orphanage. Rabbit could see a vein beginning to bulge in the side of Viet’s temple. Then how do you know any of it is true, he hissed. Even in the dark Rabbit could see his face twisting in strange ways, the dark blood lumping under the skin. She watched as it grew bigger and bigger, the vein knuckling on the side of his face to the size of two, three, four fingers, five, and counting. How do you know, Viet screamed, the lump bright purple and half the size of his head.

Rabbit bolted upright in her seat. Outside a series of paddies floated by, the rice gently waving as if underwater. Inside the van was silent. Up front Viet peered off up the road. Tao was slumped asleep in the back, mouth closed, the moon in the sky following them south.

Hours later, just before dawn, after they had walked the muddy fields they had come all that way to stand in, Rabbit will see for herself. It will happen on her way back to the van that will carry them back to the thirty-six streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, the portraits of the dead rolling through the district. As Rabbit, more tired than she has ever been, is about to climb in the van, she will look over at Tao standing in a nearby stream, Tao humming to herself, face calm as a cloud as she balances on one foot while washing the other, each of Tao’s feet perfectly formed but small as fists. Even from where Rabbit is standing she will catch the scent on the wind. Tao rubbing the dirt from her soles, her feet fragrant as roses.

From the Latin for “terrible,” “cruel.” Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man’s teeth down to the gums. And what happens if we don’t remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing .

ON THE WAY BACK TO HANOI, RABBIT WAS SURPRISED BY HOW many wandering ghost temples they passed. In the daylight each one was clearly visible. A few of them looked weather-beaten but still intact. The intricate scrollwork flared off their roofs in the Chinese style. In the night she hadn’t realized there were so many, each one a sanctuary for the dead. How long do they stay, said Linh, turning around in her seat. Rabbit was tired. She could barely bring herself to answer. It had taken them thirteen hours to get to My Kan. It would take them another thirteen hours to get home. As long as they need to. Qui looked at Linh and nodded. In the front seat Linh turned to Viet. Uncle, she said quietly, please pull over. He glanced in the rearview. I will find us a spot, he said. Eventually they came to a banyan tree growing by the side of the road, the one tree sprouting several trunks as if it were a whole grove. Viet pulled over and parked the van in its shade. After the others climbed out, Qui pulled the curtains shut and unbuttoned her shirt. Rabbit was so weak from the few hours spent in My Kan she could barely lift her head.

Listen. There are things we know that we cannot say. For example, if you were to ask him, Viet will say he has never been married, that he has never had a child, but in the last room of the museum down in Saigon there are shelves lined with jars, pale bleached things held in suspension. The room is overwhelmed with them, in places the jars two deep, each different in its own way. Some contain two-headed cows, others dogs and cats with massive deformities — prehensile tails, the stumps of extra heads growing out of odd places, one a fetal pig, but the moony thing has flippers. Work your way toward the case that contains human fetuses, somebody’s baby preserved in formaldehyde. The children are grotesque and seem to shine, their skin luminous and unfinished. Many are conjoined, some at the head, others in the body, their shapes alphabetic and strange. Because of the long years of defoliants, unnatural clouds sprayed without mercy, ours is a land with the highest rates of deformity. How these creatures must have killed their mothers, torn them open in the long hot night of their births. Rest assured that there is no one in there, each one just a vessel, nothing more. Pick a jar off the shelf and clasp it in your arms. Sing to it. Rock it to sleep, the liquid softly sloshing like blood through the heart. Despite their monstrousness, they are unmistakably human; one with his intestines on the outside of his body floats sucking his thumb .

THERE WERE STILL TOURISTS WANDERING THROUGH THE OLD quarter when the van arrived back in the city a little after ten at night. The humidity hung in the air, the mugginess like being trapped in a net. Viet turned onto Hang Giay. Linh waved at the old woman on the corner selling postcards and potato chips. A small fire burned in a basket at her feet.