Duong Huong - The Zenith

His adventuresome looks created a strong presence that made others envious and fearful. Additionally, the way he treated people made the villagers admire him. Such worldly qualities were surely rare occurrences where people are bound tightly to mountainsides. Good hearts are also hard to find there; but if found, they can’t do much good where standards of living are so marginal. In the most brutal winters, so many widowed mothers and orphaned children could rely only on his help, because the public social welfare budget, at the most, could provide no more than twenty kilos of unhusked rice. Mr. Quang never gave unhusked rice. He didn’t want to annoy anyone. Where the cooperative gave unhusked rice, he donated kindling, polished rice, fish sauce, sugar, lard, and money. As such, it was advantageous for both the giver and the receiver. Too many people were indebted to him. But he placed no demands on them, as if he couldn’t help but assist them. That practice seems a bit strange, but it gave lighter hearts both to him and to those in his debt. And his imposing house took on the role of a small village shrine, a place providing everyone with the warmth of a living community and moments of relaxed happiness; the cheerful ambience of a summer festival that brightens hard and sad lives in the mountain fastness.

That winter, with those bone-chilling rains and interminable northern winds, out of habit people looked toward his house, but there no more did a fire burn brightly. Though nobody passed the word, no one dared come to his home. They knew that he had left with his knife and his ruler more than a month before, after relinquishing the house and its money to his youngest son. He had to go down to the town to work because the family’s wealth was gone. Nobody dared empathize with his sadness or console him. Nobody dared bring up the subject of his wife’s strange condition. For those who are humble and unsophisticated and who are used to living frugally, such a disease is a curse. It is similar to typhoid fever, tuberculosis, or dysentery in the old days. Bereft of a familiar refuge, the villagers had to turn to a family in the middle section that had newly become wealthy, that of Miss Vui, the Party Committee secretary.

Miss Vui was thirty-two years old, never married, destined maybe to never fall in love with anyone. Or, to be more accurate, it seems most unlikely that anyone would ever fall in love with her, not because she is bad in character or in looks, but because she is several inches taller than even the tallest men in the village. With such stature, she also has massively square shoulders, as if she were made for carrying baskets on a pole, with overly developed and rock-hard muscles. Her shoulders would fit well on a first-class martial artist. One of her hands could easily knock over a guy her age. She is in the mold of her father, Mr. Vang, formerly a famous martial artist in the three provinces on the western side of the Red River, who earned quite a bit of money prize-fighting all over the north. The village residents all agree she so resembles her father that if she shaved her head and stripped to a loincloth, she could enter the ring and make opponents shake with fear, as her father did when he was famous. Mr. Vang had a mole larger than a black bean in the middle of his neck. On this mole, hair always grew, each strand longer than three inches. Miss Vui also has a similar mole, but under her chin; each day she has to look in the mirror to cut the little tuft. If she gets lost in her work and forgets this task, the hairs grow long, oddly twisting. Perhaps all these peculiarities leave her unable to have a husband like other women. She turns every male fainthearted. Her looks as well as her strength are hot topics for the village men to discuss when they work on the cassava grass under the hot June sun or sit and smoke water pipes on rainy days. There are a thousand ways to bring up a funny story about her, usually with just a question, some fact common to both men and women in the upper hamlet:

“Yesterday I saw Vui carry beehives up the hills. Her legs moved differently.”

“Different how?”

“Her legs shifted out on both sides, as if something were tucked inside.”

“Something stuck between her legs, unless she tied there a coolee or a fox?”

“You crazy old man, just like a saint who lies…I think someone has crossed into paradise.”

“Fairy heaven or paradise: you black peasant who tries to be literary! Just say bluntly that someone jumped on her belly. Who would so dare risk his life? Maybe you? I see your face looking kind of guilty!”

“Me? It would be such an honor! Many times I wanted to try, but when I saw her my penis just shrank down like one on a three-year-old. Hey, I’ll step aside for you.”

“I’m very grateful to you; but not enough guts. I am afraid I might just turn off in the middle. And my kids are still chicken and duck eggs with nobody to raise them. I’ll step aside for anyone with stronger willpower.”

“Let’s bet: whoever dares touch Vui’s cavern will be feted for one whole month. The losers will take turns paying for good wine and juicy chickens.”

“Never; what value would your wine and chickens have?”

“OK, how about a young calf?”

“No young calf is worth the loss of half of one’s life.”

“How about three of them?”

“Three cows or ten cows, add in three bars of Kim Thanh gold, I will still decline.”

“Don’t joke around: three gold bars would build five brick houses.”

“So, then, why don’t you try?”

“I don’t bet on bluffs. If you all put in enough money to buy the gold, I will put my life on the line immediately.”

“You’d sacrifice yourself in public? Nobody believes that. Your wife is barely five feet and only ninety pounds yet she pouts and tells everybody that you are hopeless, that you pump three times and fall out of bed; before you get to the market, all your coins have already dropped out. Like that and still you boast.”

“Don’t believe a woman’s mouth. Are you in the bed with me to know anything?”

“OK, someday let’s have a contest. We’ll call out the administrative committee to judge; we’ll borrow Mr. Quang’s watch to check the time. You and your wife on the left, me and my wife on the right. Whoever loses must give up a cow. I won’t eat that cow alone but will grill it for everyone in the hamlet. So, are we on?”

“You are a little smart-ass. My hair is in two colors, I won’t be stupid enough to lose a cow to an oversexed guy like you. OK, I concede. If you believe you have an iron rod, why don’t you try it on Vui just once? Her family must have hundreds of gold bars, not just three. Everybody says that after Vang passed away, she pulled in the money. The old man must love his daughter to watch over her day and night. If you can get into bed with her, right away your life will really improve. Not like a mouse that falls into a basket of rice, but like one who lands in a jar of gold.”

“No way, not for money, gold, or jade, I won’t do it. I dare only to get on my wife’s belly or on some equally silly woman. But with Vui, we speak in the presence of Martial Artist Vang’s spirit: if I were to test her strength, for sure I would perish in the middle of the struggle. Perhaps I can only duck my head into the cavern and pop out again or put my foot into it for a little kick.”

Such chatty sessions could go on and on before becoming boring. No doubt the tedious, hard work in the countryside drives people to seek such distractions, even when they suddenly realize that the joking around can hurt another’s reputation or can even be cruel. On Miss Vui’s part, she doesn’t care what people say behind her back. She lives just like a man, doing all that only men can shoulder. She shows no sadness or loneliness like other women dreaming of happiness. Because they are married and have children, happy fortune rarely comes to them while hardships quickly arrive to wear them down. Sometimes when out briskly walking, with a face full of confidence, she makes even the most successful men envious, leaving them with an inexplicable hurt as if an invisible force has crushed them flat like a runaway fox killed by a horse cart. Especially after Mr. Vang passed on, anything she touched turned into money. When alive, he had built houses for his daughter, guessing that she couldn’t live an ordinary life. He taught her carpentry, bee farming, tea growing, and noodle manufacturing…anything that could turn into pieces of paper good for spending or that could entice somebody’s desires. Vui is smart, and has an unusual aptitude: she can learn any trade thoroughly. Her mother died in childbirth; she was raised by her paternal grandmother; and when that grandmother died, Mr. Vang gave up his travels and returned to Woodcutters’ Hamlet to be with his only daughter. People did not understand why he never remarried to provide a caretaker for his household, to have someone bear him a son. His only reply to the concerns of his neighbors was this brief comment: