Duong Huong - The Zenith

A bitterness fills Vu’s heart: “My gosh!..How he longs for a father! Having a father is really an ordinary fact for millions of other children, but for him it is the ultimate dream, or maybe just an illusion. Pity this poor orphan prince.”

He looks deep into Trung’s clear brown eyes, a doe’s eyes. Gloriously beautiful, yes, but a bit effeminate. Is it merely because of this stunning beauty that he must endure a hard fate? This fleeting thought arises as a light wind. Vu holds tight the hands of the adopted son and repeats each word: “You are my child. For a long time I didn’t want to disclose this for fear of many issues. But now, Son, I have to tell you the truth. Because you have reached an age of mature understanding.”

“Father!”

The boy rushes into his arms, the sudden happiness making him burst into sobs. He leans his head against Vu’s chest, tears pouring down his face, soaking wet like a stream. Vu quietly squeezes the child. Together, both tenderness and bitterness invade him and his throat chokes.

The clock on the wall leisurely rings twelve times. Vu continues reading, as if nothing has happened. His wife comes up behind him and tries to close the book.

“You should go to bed, it’s getting late.”

Vu turns back to the page and says, “You go to bed first.…I need to read.”

“I apologize…”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.…To be truthful, the mistake is the forced union between us…I regret…”

“What do you mean…” Van says, raising her face, which is warming at his calm but painful words. She wants to debate, to persuade, to show her goodwill. But Vu turns around, raises his hand, and points at the four surrounding walls. Van knows that they cannot talk in here, where recording bugs are placed everywhere, from inside the house to the big trees in the yard. She finds a piece of white paper and writes:

“We will talk about this tomorrow.”

He writes his reply right underneath: “Tomorrow, I have to leave at 6 a.m.”

“Then when can I talk to you?”

“When I return.”

“Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

Van crumples the paper and burns it, a longstanding habit of theirs. Then she goes to bed. Remaining in front of the table, he turns the pages but not a single word registers. On his chest, the tears of the adopted son are still warm; in his ears, still the sounds of a sobbing boy. He can guess what kind of storm had roiled the child’s soul that afternoon:

“Poor little one…For so many years, he silently sought traces of a father. No matter how much I loved him, no matter how hard I fulfilled a father’s role genuinely, with dedication and with passion, that lack would leave a huge hole which could never be filled. Blood ties are the invisible strings that unite the generations.

“You are my own son. The blood that runs in your veins is my own blood. The skin that covers your body is mine as well! — Why did I speak so? Was it the inspiration of spirits or the temptation of the devil?”

Whatever it was, the words had been said. Words once spoken, four horses chasing them cannot catch up with them. From today on, the fate of the boy is bound to his by this secret relationship. The mystery of this fate arises to hide another mystery.

Really, he doesn’t know if he behaved rightly or wrongly when he told Trung that he was his son — a child born out of wedlock, to be exact. But that afternoon, he hadn’t had the opportunity to think, nor the time to ponder. He had acted in the manner of a poet caught up in compulsive inspiration, even though he is not a poet, and is not even familiar with acting on such compulsion. But he knew what to do when his own wife and their own son had pushed the adopted child into bitter despair.

“Am I responsible for letting this shabby and bad situation develop?” he wonders.

And his soul fills with darkness.

He cannot measure the complexity of life. He feels too powerless to steer the family vessel. Perhaps he has insufficient insight and lacks the courage to possibly understand the natural inclinations of the woman and his own son?

“Perhaps I lack both, both clarity and courage. I lack both of the most necessary qualities in a man, in a father and in a husband. It seems someone once told me that.”

Perhaps…

Sounds from the past always follow the word “perhaps,” and with those sounds one turns pages yellowed with the stains of time. Vu knows that inside him is a man from the past, one who is concerned with family traditions and the values that cluster around them. For this reason, a son, someone to sustain the lineage, was his most secret and most earnest longing after he had married. After seventeen years of failure, the day Vinh was born was for him a celebration, “shedding tears of happiness,” as they said thousands of years ago. Vu remembers staying up with Van for three consecutive nights as she went through her labor pains. He sat up so that she could lean on him when she did not want to lie down; he gave her his arm so that she could pinch and scratch when the pains tortured her. After the birth was over, both his arms were covered with scars that took a month to heal. The other women in the room had looked at Van with obvious jealousy. They had looked at him with unhidden envy. His wife certainly had not forgotten that. She couldn’t have forgotten that it was he who readily took on the responsibility to launder and cook, to serve her, even though the families on both sides, as well as his office, had plenty of people to help out. Everything he had done flowed from a clear realization that his wife must feel the utmost happiness when she became a mother, when bloodlines mix to create a new human being, the one with the mandate to maintain and prolong the names, the corporal images, and the reputations of the two family lines.

When Vinh was still young, from one to six years old, his features were dainty, his face was beautiful like a “lady from Hong Kong,” and he looked more like his mother than his father. The two then thought he would grow up to become a movie star, if not as famous as one from Hollywood, at least like an Yves Montand or an Alain Delon. But from the age of ten, his features totally changed. Vinh lost his movie star look, and took on the features of a tough guy. Then, when Vinh came in second in an elementary school athletic contest, he and his wife changed their dream of an artist to one about a sports champion. Besides changing in appearance, the boy also revealed a character that few parents would wish for. First, he became an awful glutton. His son became sickeningly avid when sitting down to eat, at which time he would not see anybody or pay attention to anything, except bending down to get his food. On special occasions, his wife would invite chefs over to cook unusual dishes. On such occasions Vinh would skip school to stay home, dashing to the kitchen to help himself to the food even before his parents and the guests. Many times, Van tried to persuade Vu that a child who eats well is something to rejoice at, because he will grow big and strong. But when he looked at his son hunched over the table and eating while hardly swallowing or breathing, Vu felt his face heat up. When Vinh was twelve, the hair around his mouth grew bushy and his voice broke low; his mother asked Vinh to eat separately with Trung in the kitchen so that Vu would not feel ashamed.

It was probable that when she had to face reality on her own, his wife also suffered. But in front of him, she never backed down. At all costs, she had to protect her son, the only masterpiece of her life as a mother. Often, too, he wanted to go along with her, to believe that their son would become “someone very famous in the future.”

He often told himself that a person’s abilities could mature late, bloom late in the season, kick in as needed like slow-burning coal, imitate the Chinese mandarin Lu Wang, who sat fishing on a rock for more than eight years before he lifted a finger to help rule his country. In such fashion, his son might someday become a famous scientist, a designer of airplanes, of boats, a creator of special new chemical formulas, or a doctor who could cure nasty diseases. It was completely possible for the boy to become someone helpful to the people, bringing honor to his ancestors. With the condition that he would have to change his personality and become someone who loved to study.