John Sayles - The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

There was garbage everywhere in Da Nang, small mountains of it that little boys fought and played on. People in the camps sat all day waiting for food, crowded together like insects. There were girls on the streets, country girls who had sold eggs and produce in the market before the fighting. Buy me, buy me, they said. Me numba-one gell, suckee-suckee, sixhundred pi.

Plunkett would come to drink and for boom-boom. He liked how thin her body was, how her breasts barely stuck out. My little girl, he called her. He asked if she had a little sister he could meet. Tan said she had no sisters. He showed pictures of his little daughters back in America. Plunkett didn't like the name Tan, he called her Betsy. It was the same name as one of his daughters.

He smiled and laughed constantly, like a child. He said he didn't like her eyes. They looked like she was hiding something from him. You trick me, he would say. Alla time samesame. You Betsy unscrutable gell. He gave her money to have the round-eye operation like Madame Ky, like the other girls in the house. She sewed it in the chair.

Tan had been in Da Nang three months when the word came about the men and boys taken from the Phu Cam Cathedral. Their bones were found buried together in the jungle a few miles from Hue. Most shot, some buried alive. Over four hundred men and boys. Plunkett gave Tan money to send to care for her brothers' bones.

Her belly grew. The other girls noticed first, then Plunkett. He was very angry and took her to his friend Dr. Yin.

Dr. Yin was Chinese and smelled of ammonia. Tan was terrified. Plunkett reassured her that Dr. Yin was an American, a soldier, and his friend. But Chinese was Chinese. Tan screamed and had to be given a shot when the young doctor approached her.

She was thin again then, but Plunkett didn't seem to like her so much. He brought her a Catholic-schoolgirl's uniform, like she had worn when she was little, and had her put it on for the boom-boom. Sometimes he made her bend over so he could hit her with his belt. He didn't smile or laugh so much anymore.

Plunkett left things at the apartment, medicines, food, sometimes guns. He ordered Tan not to touch them. She listened for hours to the American radio he had given her. She would lie in the dark at night twisting the dial back and forth, listening to all the different languages, all the voices blending into each other. She felt like she was floating, hearing everyone's private thoughts. When she woke the batteries would be dead and she'd be without radio till Plunkett came. He always had batteries with him.

Tan was twenty, had been in Da Nang two years, when she saw her sister on the street. Two Americans were walking with their Vietnamese girls. One of them was Xuan. She looked like all the other street girls, looked like she could take care of herself. Her American called her Sue-Anne. Tan followed, listening to her sister laugh at what the Americans were saying, and then let them walk out of sight. A moment later she thought better of it and tried to catch up, but Xuan had turned some corner and was gone.

Plunkett said he would send Tan to America. She would help him be a rich man. He explained that in America opium was used just like money, better than money. But government police would steal it from you, just like in.Viet- nam. It was hard to bring opium to America, but Tan could help him.

He took her back to his friend Dr. Yin. They explained how much just a little opium was worth if it was pure. She watched the doctor put it into the implants. They would be like a cyst, he said, like a thorn that the skin grows over. Harmless.

Tan lay on the slab and remembered all the stories Quat had told her. Dr. Yin put her under. She dreamed of riding a bicycle in a quiet, walled city.

When she woke her breasts felt mammoth, they jutted out stiffly from her body. The skin was stretched taut, the nipples pointing up and out. There was a scar in the crease beneath each breast, creases she had never had before. The breasts didn't feel a part of her. They belonged to Plunkett. He loved to grab them in bed. The-future is in my "hands, he would say, and smile like he used to.

He arranged for her to go to the American city of San Francisco. He would come later. Tan was afraid to tell him about the money she had hoarded, afraid he wouldn't understand. It was in piasters, and wouldn't be any good in America. It wasn't opium. The day before the plane took her, Tan ripped the money out of the chair and gave it to the other girls in the house.

It would be good in San Francisco, she thought. No one was fighting and there was always enough food.

A nurse, a young American girl, calls Tan into the office. She is seated in a leather reclining chair. Doctor is in the back washing his hands, says the nurse, I'm his assistant. The nurse asks Tan if she is sure she wants to go through with the eye operation, says she is a very pretty woman already. Tan says she wants to go ahead. The nurse leaves.

There are more pictures on the walls inside the office. Before and After pictures, profiles of breasts enlarged or made smaller. A picture of the doctor in Army fatigues sitting on a pile of sandbags. Tan closes her eyes, tries to steady her heartbeat.

Tan lived in a bad-smelling Mission Street hotel run by an old Thai man. The rent seemed high, but that was something the nuns hadn't taught about in English. Tan avoided talking to anyone, she took all her money with her if she went out and never walked more than a few blocks from the hotel. She waited for Plunkett.

A young brown-skinned woman with a little baby lived in the next room. Sometimes at night she would play her radio, slow, sad songs in Spanish to keep her baby from crying. Tan would lie in bed, listening through the wall, and think how nice it would be if she could be friends with the woman.

Tan waited. Her American money began to run out. She ate rice at a Vietnamese restaurant on Powell Street. On the sign out front was a map of Vietnam with the northern half painted red and the southern half painted green and all the major cities labeled. Young American men would come by with their girls and point to spots on the map, but very few came inside. Mr. Thuong, who ran the restaurant, would talk with Tan while she ate. He had come to America during the fighting between the French and the Communists. He seemed very kind, but Tan was careful not to tell much about herself. Her bill never came to what it said on the menu.

Tan waited in her room on Mission Street. She was afraid. Afraid of the Americans, afraid of being alone, afraid of being caught with the opium. They had searched her when she got to the Hawaii airport, a woman had put her hands up in Tan's private parts.

Plunkett wrote her a letter saying when he was coming. He wrote in the child-language he had used to talk with her. It was very hard to read. Tan went to the docks to meet him.

Passengers came off the big boat, but Plunkett was not among them. Tan asked a man from the boat, who took her to a policeman. The policeman said that Plunkett had been taken for questioning. He asked Tan's name and address and she gave him false ones. Plunkett never showed up at the hotel. Questioning meant the same thing in America that it did in Vietnam.

Mr. Thuong gave Tan a job at the restaurant when her money was gone. She made salads in the kitchen and tried to avoid the busboys and dishwashers, who were all Chinese. Mr. Thuong couldn't pay her much, she didn't have a Green Card, but if she ate at the restaurant she had enough to pay her rent.

One of the waitresses, a Korean girl named Kim, was friendly to her. Kim had another job, being a girl in a Chinese bar on Pacific Street. The Chinese men would come in a little drunk and Kim would sit by them and talk and they would buy her drinks. It made more money for the bar. The Chinese tried to do more and you could make extra. Kim let them touch her breasts. Kim said she was willing to sell her breasts but nothing beyond that. The girls in the bar were all Koreans and had American boyfriends or husbands. They had come over from their country with soldier husbands. Kim said it would pay much more than making salads, said the Chinese men would like Tan. She was small and delicate but had big breasts for them to touch.