Duong Huong - The Zenith

“You lie.…Who would dare put out a hand to a neighbor with only two spoonfuls of honey?”

“The little cup where I keep the honey is still in our cupboard; come over later and look for yourself.”

“That’s the truth. She suddenly became so generous only because she wanted to be on warm terms with her neighbors, but she also wanted to use gossip to destroy her opponent. It is not that she sacrificed her time and money for nothing, renting a car and going all the way to Khoai Hamlet to investigate the happenings of another woman. A stable person would be crazy to do that.”

“At that time I simply thought she had followed Quy’s orders.”

“An order from the chairman is only that effective if your heart gives it a push.”

“How true. Now I remember; I may have had eyes but I was blind. I am the very one that stood close to her during Mrs. Quang’s funeral. I saw her lighting incense three times and doing all three bows.”

“To bow low three times so that the poor dead soul would agree to her stepping into the conjugal bed with the widowed husband.”

“Neighbors and relatives should bow only once; that’s proper etiquette.”

“It was so obvious but nobody noticed; her tactics were most discreet.”

“Not so discreet really; we were blinded by a ghost so we saw nothing. I guess that Mr. Do is at work helping his beloved daughter find a husband to give him some grandchildren perhaps. She’s over thirty; there’s no time to wait.”

“No ghost closed our eyes. We’re just oblivious. This spinster girl has a strategy. After thinking about it, I realized that it is right on the button that she chose Mr. Quang as her target. In this village, he has wealth and guts, has lived the most, been out in the world for how many years now? Who here beside him would dare to touch her?”

“That’s exactly it! But being clever can’t overthrow heaven’s plans. Without heaven’s OK, a hundred thousand strategies will all come to naught. Because of this they say: ‘Luck is better than brains.’”

“The delicious reward fell from her mouth, so, in revenge, she followed Quy. She thought she would surely find a place on Mrs. Quang’s classy bed. There was the chance to form a large estate; he is half a pound, she is eight ounces — no big difference between them. She didn’t expect some faraway woman to fly in like a swallow to land right on the branch of her dream lover. That destroyed everything.”

“This time she miscalculated. A cultured gentleman pays no attention to his wife’s possessions. Only gold diggers think of the purse. ‘He is the captain, she is the ship.’ A real gentleman chooses beauty and virtue.”

“Exactly. Mr. Quang has too much money to look for a woman with means. He carries one as beautiful as a fairy, young and fresh, with fragrant skin. To be sixty and have it like that, to die there are no regrets.”

“To sum up, the spinster is not that clever.”

“Don’t rush to judgment. Miscalculating, but still supple with maneuvers. Her head holds more strategies than do all of our empty heads put together. I challenge you all to shift position as she did. She was on Quy’s side but with a quick leap she becomes Mr. Quang’s ally. People say ‘troubled waters protect the heron.’ So it is.”

“We must admit this woman is a terror. Mr. Quang is as secretive as a sphinx but she discovered that his influence with the district, the province, was as strong as split bamboo. She must have an ear on the inside: a relative sitting with those in authority. Never underestimate a woman who can run from here to there, who can leave the east for the west, as fast as a flip of the hand.”

“Unable to hold Mr. Quang’s tuber, she got her hands on the seal of the village committee instead. Now she is in the first ranks of those in power, the boss of over two thousand people in Woodcutters’ Hamlet. So, didn’t she win big?”

“A huge victory for sure; nobody denies that. But I ask you all: Her head is full of strategies but does she have any gravel inside her turtle?”

“Yes; yes, she has. Pay attention and listen when she walks by: a row of gravel on each hip rattles away.”

“You’re dead now! Tonight I will tell your wife that you always tilt your head to listen to Vui’s bell ringing. She will pull your ears for sure.”

“Oh well! Telling my wife would be useless. She knows that on seeing that old maid my pair would wilt and the hour hand would right away swing to the number six.”

“Poor baby, with great power and high position, with a large house and patio, yet her turtle is all moldy. Perhaps if we hit it now, it would sound like a temple’s wooden gong.”

“Insolent! How dare you compare one with the other? It’s out of order; the elders will slap you and give you a swollen mouth.”

“Sorry, I beg you all to forgive, I am silly and my tongue slips.”

“Be quiet! I have a challenge for you men, also for the ladies if you wish to participate. I ask you: From now on, what trees will Chairman Vui plant?”

“Why do you ask such a crazy question? Who sits in her brain to know?”

“But I know; what will you give me for telling you?”

“Agreed: drinks with fried catfish.”

“That’s too puny, I won’t do it.”

“A second round of drinks, this time with a young chicken steamed with salt and lime leaves.”

“Still not enough.”

“Add a third round with entrails over thin rice noodles, seasoned with shrimp paste and basil.”

“I accept! Now, open your ears and listen. From now on, our village chairwoman will pull up all the trees in her yard and replace them with only banana trees. A kind of banana tree propagated in Hung Yen, also called the ‘propagating’ banana, or the ‘show off’ banana with each fruit weighing a pound or more, bigger than the pestle housewives use to pound up crabs.”

The women immediately screamed as if they had been bitten by a centipede or doused with boiling water:

“You scoundrel!”

“You dirty old man!”

“You devil; heaven will hit you hard!”

Then they laughed furiously, madly, with shrieking noises like those of the insane; laughing so hard they started to choke and cough. Thus, these kinds of discussions always climax with such a strange and obscene metaphor, where the imagination of rural folk is used to the maximum to gather up all the burdens hidden in their souls and then shoot a machine-gun belt of bullets at someone being pilloried before an ancient and permanent court of justice.

Such half-serious, half-joking stories about the powerful woman were in fact a way to obtain revenge; an unconscious way, but one as old as the earth. When emotions bring turmoil to a community, people must find a way to restore balance, to reinforce faith in themselves, and, in the end, to prepare themselves for the future. The most convenient course is to find an object to offer to a formless deity, a divine and most powerful one with enough magic power to melt away all ills. In the past, people took the most beautiful girls in a region and threw them into the deep sea to satisfy the king of the sea dragons, who would have a name like Royal Green Dragon, White Dragon, or Black Dragon, depending on which part of the sea received the offering. Nowadays, however, people living in Woodcutters’ Hamlet could not throw their own daughters into deep ravines as offerings to formless gods. So they sacrificed at the burning stake of public opinion the one who had the most vulnerable reputation. In this situation, no one was more deserving than the newly appointed village chair, Nguyen Thi Vui. The nightmare of a child in the middle section had spawned a storm all over the region, but mostly over the people of this one village — a gigantic monster fighting with its own child, which had just come out of its womb. Wasn’t that an image of what is most terrifying and feared in life: no good fortune, no virtue, and no moral conscience?