Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

It was another ten minutes before the strangers arrived. The sun was down, the moon on the edge of the trees. She wondered where they were coming from so late in the day. Through the woods she could hear a dog barking, the meditative waters of the Swallow Bird River surging a short distance away. The Mountain of the Fragrant Traces was said to be the home of Quan Am, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Lady’s home a grotto no bigger than a coffin. According to legend the tiny grotto was lined with a thirty-foot snake, the Lady curled up tight in its coils.

Qui and Tu were late coming home from the river. Perhaps the two of them had stopped somewhere in among the trees. Evenings Tu checked the nets for fish while Qui tended the hives barehanded. They never coupled in the one room the four of them shared, Rabbit and Linh sleeping in hammocks and the two of them down on a mat on the floor, though Rabbit knew things were different when they were alone. The way Tu and Qui would float back into the house at the end of the day, faces luminous.

And now someone was making their way to the door. Rabbit wondered who would be desperate enough to brave the government edict. She heard the gate creak open on its rusty hinges. At the noise, the female parakeet winced. Anytime the gate swung open, Rabbit thought of bone grinding on bone. Outside the full moon was rising like a trophy over the tops of the trees.

When the man and woman stepped into the yard, Linh was already standing in the doorway with her arms akimbo, the female parakeet perched on her shoulder, the little girl’s delicate features in sharp contrast to her iron bearing. Xin chao, xin chao , said the bird. Linh stuck her finger in its black beak and quickly motioned the visitors inside. After they were in, she peered up and down the road to see if anyone was watching. When she finally closed the door, she blew out the candle burning on the table, throwing the scene even further into darkness.

The room was small and cluttered. Two sleeping mats lay in the dirt, a pair of hammocks hanging by the window, pots and baskets stacked on either side of the door. An old fishing net was heaped in a corner, the netting full of holes chewed by rats. The only light was from the fire burning in the open pit. In the tight space the woman visitor stood behind the man as if trying to make herself smaller. The man smelled of cigarettes, his teeth stained from addiction. The skin around his eyes was lighter than the rest of his face. Little Sister, he said to Linh. He kept his eyes on the floor. His hands were shaking. The villagers who live along the Swallow Bird River say in this house there is one who speaks with the dead.

Linh began to stroke the parakeet on her shoulder. She looked the man right in the face. Child, she said. You are mistaken. Linh waved her hand around the empty room. I am the only one here. Then the door opened and Tu and Qui walked in. There was a smattering of stray twigs stuck in Qui’s silvery hair. What’s going on here, said Tu. He was holding a fish, the thing wriggling and iridescent in his arms. Who are you? When he and Qui walked in, the room grew a little brighter.

The man began to talk. He explained who he was and what he did. He introduced the woman standing just at his shoulder, the woman with a face like none of them had ever seen, a face at once like their own but at the same time darker and foreign, her long eyelashes curling back on themselves. Please, said the man. I just want to show her everything there is to see in Vietnam. He made a gesture of supplication with his hands. This is the country where she was born, he said. Tu sighed. The fish continued to wriggle in his arms. We are her people, the man added as if that would help.

Then the floor opened up at their feet. The woman gasped and jumped back. The man with the pale skin ringing his eyes fell to his knees. Rabbit came rising out of the earth, the male parakeet on her shoulder. The female parakeet flew across the room and perched next to its mate. I hear you, said Rabbit. More than two decades after the end of the war, the woman’s kind were starting to come back. For the past few years, thousands of adults who had been given up as children during the war were returning to the country where they’d been born.

Something fat and gray went scurrying across the floor leaving a trail in the dirt, the tracks an indecipherable script. The dark woman looked to her guide. Is she talking to me, said the woman. Please, is this about me?

Sometimes a body is lifted from a chair and walks to where it sees a silent crowd. When you come rising up out of the earth from the secret place your father has once again hollowed in the floor, a strange man and woman are standing in the room, the woman dark in a way you have never seen before. The journey she has taken to arrive at your door is long and arduous and weirdly joyful. This unlikely combination of circumstances opens your ears again for the first time in what will be for you a new age. Everything is interconnected. How the young rice is carried by hand from field to flooded field. Transplantation. The green stalk putting down roots. What you want to say to her: “Wherever you go in the world, even if you find yourself in a strange land among strangers who love you, know that someone will always be listening who loved you first,” but there is no need to say this as the woman already knows, a presence at her shoulder keeping watch as she has always suspected. When you take her hand in yours, a symphony of voices rises from her skin, ancestors multi-various like the branches of a tree. The world stirs in mysterious ways. For your own reasons you stopped listening to us in the years when you lost hope, but now our voices are calling you back with our stories like song. The woman is not looking for anything or anyone. She is not asking you to listen on her behalf. She knows she does not walk alone and never has. And now in the light of this room where she stands in the presence of one who might bring her face-to-face with her origins, she lets the awareness wash over her. Consequently please do as you have always done and say, “I hear you,” and leave it at that .

THEY WERE ALMOST TO THE RIVER. IT WAS A SHORT WALK through the dense woods that surrounded the mountain. The hour of biting insects was long over. Moonlight poured through the canopy and dappled the ground. They walked single file, bats darting through the muggy night air, the parakeets resting on Qui and Linh’s shoulders. Rabbit could hear the slow waters of the Swallow Bird River ambling through the darkness, the water gurgling like a baby. She could see the mountain looming over the trees. For a moment it seemed as though a tiny light were burning on the mountainside. She imagined a figure sitting in the light as if at a window, the figure like a star, invisible in the daylight but nevertheless always there.

After the two strangers left, Rabbit told Tu what she’d seen. He took a deep breath. The stain on the edge of his hairline gleamed as if freshly bloodied. Okay, he said. He handed her the fish he’d been holding and went out the door to see if he could find a boat.

Despite the lateness of the hour Qui began to flit around the room. Rabbit watched as she hefted a pot in her hand, then put it back. In time Qui tested everything they owned only to leave it all where it was.

Finally Qui took the burlap sack hanging from the altar out into the yard. From the doorway Rabbit noticed a strange shadow gliding independently along in the moonlight. She rubbed her eyes. When Qui found the small spade they used to plant vegetables, she got to work, her silvery hair sparkling. There were no voices chattering, just the clatter of bones as she lowered the sack in and buried it. The shadow stayed put where it was in the yard even as Qui hustled back inside, the shadow quivering as if weeping. It had been years since Rabbit had seen him standing at the border in the shadow of the guardhouse. She knew if she could see him now, the eternal scratch branching down his face would not be healed.