Kim Thuy - Ru

Coming home after leaving my cousins at the University of Sherbrooke, I was approached in a gas station by a Vietnamese man who had recognized my vaccination scar. One look at that scar took him back in time and let him see himself as a little boy walking to school along a dirt path with his slate under his arm. One look at that scar and he knew that our eyes had already seen the yellow blossoms on the branches of plum trees at the front door of every house at New Year’s. One look at that scar brought back to him the delicious aroma of caramelized fish with pepper, simmering in an earthen pot that sat directly on the coals. One look at that scar and our ears heard again the sound produced by the stem of a young bamboo as it sliced the air then lacerated the skin of our backsides. One look at that scar and our tropical roots, transplanted onto land covered with snow, emerged again. In one second we had seen our own ambivalence, our hybrid state: half this, half that, nothing at all and everything at once. A single mark on the skin and our entire shared history was spread out between two gas pumps in a station by a highway exit. He had concealed his scar under a midnight blue dragon. I couldn’t see it with my naked eye. He had only to run his finger over my immodestly exhibited scar, however, and take my finger in his other hand and run it over the back of his dragon and immediately we experienced a moment of complicity, of communion.

It was also a moment of communion when my large extended family got together in upstate New York to celebrate my grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. There were thirty-eight of us, gossiping, giggling, getting on each other’s nerves for two days. I noticed then for the first time that I had the same rounded thighs as Aunt Six and that the dress I had on was similar to Aunt Eight’s.

Aunt Eight is my big sister, the one who shared with me the thrill of the word goddess that a man had whispered in her ear when she was sitting, out of my mother’s sight, on the crossbar of his bicycle, encircled by his arms. She is also the one who showed me how to capture the pleasure of a passing desire, of an ephemeral flattery, of a stolen moment.

When my cousin Sao Mai sat behind me and embraced me for the cameras of her two sons, Uncle Nine smiled. Uncle Nine knows me better than I know myself because he bought me my first novel, my first theatre ticket, my first visit to a museum, my first journey.

Sao Mai became an important businesswoman, a public personality, a modern queen after she’d beaten dozens and dozens of eggs by hand — there were power failures five days out of seven in Saigon — to make birthday cakes that she sold to the new Communist leaders. Like an acrobat, she delivered her cakes by bicycle, zigzagging through other bicycles, avoiding the black smoke of motorcycles and the manholes with covers stolen. Today her cakes, and now also her ice cream, pastries, chocolate and coffee, are sold in every neighbourhood in the big cities, criss-crossing the country from south to north.

I am still the shadow of Sao Mai. But I like to be, because during my stay in Vietnam I was the shadow that danced around the bargaining tables to distract those with whom she was dealing while she deliberated. Because I was her shadow, she could confide in me her worries, her fears, her doubts, without compromising herself. Because I was her shadow, I was the only one who dared to enter her private life, which had been tightly sealed since the time when she sold “coffee” made from stale bread burned to a cinder then ground, on the sidewalk across from where she lived, ever since the windows of her house had been sold. Without asking permission, I relit the flames she thought had disappeared behind her now-massive facade. I cleared the way for frivolity by allowing her children to pelt each other with custard pies on my terrace, by putting them in a cardboard box full of confetti outside her room to wish her happy birthday when she woke up, by placing in her briefcase a red leather thong.

I like the red leather of the sofa in the cigar lounge where I dare to strip naked in front of friends and sometimes strangers, without their knowledge. I recount bits of my past as if they were anecdotes or comedy routines or amusing tales from far-off lands featuring exotic landscapes, odd sound effects and exaggerated characterizations. When I sit in that smoky lounge, I forget that I’m one of the Asians who lack the dehydrogenase enzyme for metabolizing alcohol, I forget that I’m marked with a blue spot on my backside, like the Inuit, like my sons, like all those with Asian blood. I forget the mongoloid spot that reveals the genetic memory because it vanished during the early years of childhood, and my emotional memory has been lost, dissolving, snarling with time.

That estrangement, that detachment, that distance allow me to buy, without any qualms and with full awareness of what I’m doing, a pair of shoes whose price in my native land would be enough to feed a family of five for one whole year. The salesperson just has to promise me, You’ll walk on air , and I buy them. When we’re able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots — not only by crossing an ocean and two continents but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees, from the empty space of an identity crisis — we can also laugh at whatever might have happened to my acrylic bracelet the colour of the gums on a dental plate, the bracelet my parents had turned into a survival kit by hiding all their diamonds in it. Who would have thought, after we avoided drowning, pirates, dysentery, that today the bracelet could be found perfectly intact, buried in a garbage dump? Who would have thought that burglars would steal from people living in an apartment as miserable as ours? Who would have imagined that thieves would saddle themselves with a ridiculous piece of jewellery made of pink plastic? All the members of my family are convinced that the burglars tossed it aside when they were sorting their haul. So maybe one day, millions of years from now, an archaeologist will wonder why diamonds were arranged in a circle and placed in the ground. He may interpret it as a religious rite, and the diamonds as a mysterious offering, like all those gold taels discovered in amazing quantities in the depths of the South China Sea.

Absolutely no one will know the true story of the pink bracelet once the acrylic has decomposed into dust, once the years have accumulated in the thousands, in hundreds of strata, because after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light.

In thirty years, Sao Mai resurfaced like a phoenix reborn from its ashes, like Vietnam from its iron curtain and my parents from the toilet bowls they had to scrub. Alone as much as together, all those individuals from my past have shaken the grime off their backs in order to spread their wings with plumage of red and gold, before thrusting themselves sharply towards the great blue space, decorating my children’s sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that to infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture. As for me, it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me. I moved forward in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.

And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life.