Kim Thuy - Mãn

Yellow pistils, white petals, green leaves,

Near to the mud but without its stench.

thơ

poem

WE PRINTED HUNDREDS OF copies of both versions of this poem to offer to our customers, who came to bask in the garden on canvas beach chairs. Students, often aspiring writers or poets, would meet on the patio under Maman’s giant squash plants, to write side by side, exchange one word for another, and reassure those who panicked over the blank page. Unobtrusively, in the privacy of that urban oasis, books were launched and texts regularly read by their authors on nights when the moon was full.

cao su

rubber

AT THE SAME TIME, La Palanche was winning over Paris, where many readers had a close relationship with Vietnam. For some it called to mind a grandfather who’d lived there at the time of French Indochina, others remembered an uncle or a distant cousin describing the plantations of “the wood that weeps,” the rubber tree that bled latex by the ton. Vietnamese revolutionaries had shattered the romantic image of hectares covered with lines of those tall, upright trees by lifting the curtain of mist that hid the sweat and the lowered heads of the coolies.

In the pale blue eyes of Francine, a reader I met at the Paris Salon du Livre, no architecture could compare with that of the Grall Hospital in Saigon, where her father, like a demigod, crossed the broad verandas that surrounded the patients’ rooms. He’d been the chief surgeon there but never had a chance to go back before he died. In spite of everything, Vietnam was in his heart until his final breath, because it was there he had abandoned the wet nurse who’d brought Francine up for eight years and the handicapped children from the orphanage he’d built like a nest, like a challenge to fate. He had battled human tragedy by making children believe that Santa Claus existed and that he was so eager to give them their presents, he’d forgotten to exchange his velvet outfit for something more tropical.

Francine had grown up among them, an older sister to the youngest and a little sister to the bigger ones. She helped feed the small children, patiently holding spoonfuls of rice, and others had taught her how to count on the Chinese abacus. At nap time, her mother played the piano to lull them to sleep. In return, the orphanage staff sang traditional nursery rhymes to put Francine’s little brother, Luc, to sleep while their mother baked cakes to celebrate Twelfth Night or the arrival of a child. When the South lost the war against the North and tanks entered the city, Francine’s family had boarded the last plane leaving Saigon, with no time to drop by the orphanage. After that, no one could come to terms with the hasty, forced departure except Luc, who was only thirteen months old at the time and did not remember that in the past he also answered to the name Lực, the “strong and all-powerful” little man in his Vietnamese circles.

nhà hàng

restaurant

FRANCINE WAITED UNTIL the Salon closed to invite me to Luc’s restaurant. The address was one of those mythic places that have come through history, including the Second World War, when floors were painted black to conceal the mosaics from the eyes of Nazi soldiers. Saigon too had survived various cataclysms, human nature’s specialty. I confirmed to her that the city had changed a lot, that some streets even had new names. The former rue Catinat, with its luxury boutiques, had become Đồng Khởi (Revolutionary Movement), and the Café Givral, where thin slices of cantaloupe were sold for high prices, had been demolished to make room for a modern building with coloured neon lights and multi-level parking.

However, I also reassured her: the Hôtel Caravelle had kept its name, the Notre-Dame church still stood out in the heart of downtown Saigon — motorcycles drove around it at every hour and at insane speeds — and she would recognize the many roundabouts, including the one at the Bến Thành Market. I made a basic map of the fifteen hundred stands overloaded with candied fruits, shoes, dried octopus, fresh vermicelli, rows of fabric. Just as in her memory, merchants still defend every square centimetre available in the narrow, bustling aisles, deafening but so alive. The two of us were immersed in nostalgia, so enamoured of our own memories of the place that Luc’s arrival at the table made us jump.

“I’ve read your book,” he told me, holding my hand for too long.

bàn tay

hand

THE MISTAKE FOLLOWED FROM that second-too-long when my fingerprints had time to become imbued with his. Could I have done otherwise? I had the hand of a child and his was a man’s, with a pianist’s fingers, long and enveloping, whose grip commands and reassures. If my jaw had not been locked and my arms linked, I might have quoted these lines by Rumi that had suddenly appeared in my head:

A fine hanging apple

in love with your stone,

the perfect throw that clips my stem.

Julie had chosen those lines for the invitation to an orchard picnic with her circle of adoptive parents. I’d copied the words onto ivory paper thirty times or so, dipping my pen in an inkwell as I’d done when I was little. I searched for a long time before I found the mauve of my childhood, the mauve of every Vietnamese student during the best years of our lives. In hard times, we would write the first draft in pencil, the second in ink, in order to reuse the notebook. We were graded as much on form as on content, because calligraphy translated idea and intention as well as respect. All those years of training when I had a mauve ink stain on my fingers had left me with fine and steady handwriting that I like to use now and then so I won’t lose flexibility in the downstrokes and lightness in the upstrokes. So I memorized those words and the precise image of the apple that has come away from the branch at the shock of a stone against the stem. The blotter that absorbed excess ink sometimes depicted, accidentally, the shape of the apple or the apple tree but never that of the stone or the throw. I was far, then, from imagining that one day I would feel like that apple caught up by a hand in the middle of its fall.

cẩm thạch

jade

I DIDN’T SLEEP AT ALL that night because, on the ceiling, a film of the minutes I’d spent in Luc’s presence ran over and over in a loop, sequence by sequence, each shot frozen in a still. I needed to know exactly what had sucked me in and projected me into that state of weightlessness. In my mind I re-examined each of the tessera in the Briare enamels that decorated the bar with a lush landscape, where morning glories were entangled with climbing roses. Was it the naive pink plumage of the cockatoos in the midst of the leaves in the mosaic that had intoxicated me? Or was it the shininess of the copper pan the server was using to prepare the crepe Suzette that had dazzled me? Or the jade green of Luc’s eyes?

Colours, like numbers, come to me first in Vietnamese. Moreover, we are not in the habit of distinguishing people by the shade of their hair or the colour of their eyes since Asians have just one tone: from very dark brown to ebony. So I had to keep revisiting the image of his face in close-up to identify the exact colour of his eyes, because blue and green are designated by one word in my mind: xanh . His xanh represented not blue, then, but green, the green of the waters of Hạ Long Bay or a dark and aged jade green, that of bracelets women wore for decades. It was said that the tones of jade become more intense with the years, that the tender pistachio green grows deeper until it is the shade of a young olive or even an avocado, if the skin of the wrist can give it a patina. The closer the tints are to lichen, fir, bottle green, the greater the value of the bracelet. At times, then, the mistress of the house would ask the maid to help her age the bracelets by wearing them on her arms. The fragile appearance of jade forces movements to slow down, imposing elegance on gestures even when the hands are chapped or darkened by coal.