Grass Roof, Tin Roof Read online

  It was under his latest name, Le Hoang Giang—a nom de plume alluding to the evanescent quality of autumn, translated literally from the Chinese as “yellow river”—that Tran met him.

  He was thirty-four years old, an unassuming presence, slender, with kind eyes, a long, gentle face, and a warm smile. His hair was black, his skin very brown. A hint of knowing and humor lingered about the edges of all his expressions, as if he were continually assessing but withholding judgment. In a crowd, he was likely to retreat, to stand against a wall or leave without warning or good-bye.

  “Tell me your idea,” he said brusquely the first time she sat down before him. As she began to speak, he rested one hand on his cheek and fixed his lucid gaze upon her.

  “I want to write a love story based on the American novel Gone With the Wind— you have probably heard of it,” she told him, suddenly unnerved by his attention. “I want to set it in our country, but follow the same story line as the original. At least in essence I want to follow it.”

  He smiled as he leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. On the opposite side of the street below was a sidewalk café that was a popular hangout for the paper’s writers and supporters; it occurred to Tran he could have been staring out the window minutes ago and seen her seated at a table down there, awaiting her appointment with him. It was raining, and the sound of water beating on the tin roofs was like nails in a metal can. Rain dripped in heavy streams from the eaves outside the open window.

  “I read that book a long time ago,” said Giang. “I found it moving. And so thorough. You must’ve been just as moved by it as I was.”

  It didn’t seem necessary to respond, but out of respect Tran said, “Yes, Uncle.” She felt she must address him formally, as her elder.

  He looked at her again. “What will happen in your version of the story?”

  She told him: instead of Atlanta at the crumbling of the Southern Confederacy, it would be the northern port town of Haiphong at the climax of French rule. The heroine would be from a rice farm in a small northern village, and her family devout French-influenced Catholics. The family would be forced to flee south at the advance of the Viet Minh, and the story would follow that passage, which would bring the heroine to Haiphong.

  “But mostly I want it to be a love story,” explained Tran. “The heroine is torn, you see, because she is in love with a childhood friend who has gone off to fight for the Viet Minh. Then there will be a second man, who is committed to neither the French nor the Viet Minh—he just wants his own personal freedom—and he falls in love with the heroine and pursues her though she tries to deny him. She herself is apolitical. She doesn’t want to go any farther south simply because she is waiting for her childhood love to find her again. Maybe my story will reflect some contemporary issues. The heroine might find herself suddenly on opposing sides from the man she loves and once could trust, but mostly, to be honest, I’d like for my story to focus on the personal, emotional lives of its characters. When it comes to literature, that’s what I’m truly interested in, you see.”

  “Yes,” said Giang, seeming bemused, “life is never interesting unless one is in love with another who is in love with something or somebody else.” He was looking at her now, but Tran felt as if he were speaking more to the space behind her than to her directly. “Where is your family from?”

  “I was born in Van Dinh in the north and in 1954 we fled south. My family—my mother, most of all—is Catholic.”

  “And where does your desire to be a writer come from, then?”

  “Ever since I was a child I have sought comfort in books, in stories,” Tran said. “My family was poor and my father could not pay for me to get a proper education, yet I insisted. I read every book I could get my hands on, I begged my brothers—who did get to go to school—to share their lessons with me. I had many disagreements with my father until finally he allowed me to take a class here and there. Then I worked hard and paid my own way through university.”

  Giang gazed at her placidly. Then he nodded. “It is no new thing, you know,” he said, “this story of men going off to war and women waiting in anguish for them to return. Every continent in the world knows this story.”

  Tran didn’t speak, unsure if he meant to belittle her ideas.

  He sat forward, laying his forearms on the desktop, his back slightly bowed as if he were about to stand. He turned his face toward the window for a moment. She could hear the hum of activity on the floor below, voices and typewriters and drawers slamming and laughter and footsteps. Finally Giang spoke: “I want you to write whatever you wish, and I will see that it gets published. Do you know, little sister, that is all I want to do myself? I am starting to think the only reprieve we will ever get from this war is when we are able to create—and it won’t lie in our hands, but in our minds alone.” He smiled sadly. “Every day I am more tired. Last night we were up very late, working. As usual.” He laid his hands flat upon the desk. She noticed they were large, his fingers long and tapered.

  “Thank you, Uncle,” she said finally, understanding it was time for her to go.

  Giang would tell her months later (when all formality between them had truly dissolved) that he’d witnessed his fate in life sealed one morning in 1955 in Hanoi. He had been eighteen years old.

  He’d written his first political essay criticizing the disunity of their nation (though he’d been cautious and also frankly undecided enough to cast no direct blame on either North or South government), and it had found its way into the dissident literary and intellectual scene that was forming at that time in the North. The essay was not a spectacular piece of writing; it was naive and spirited but had at its heart a certain lament—a sincere sadness over what was being lost at the partition of their population. An elderly established writer Giang respected called and wanted to meet him; Giang agreed to travel from Pleiku, where he had been studying, to Hanoi to meet the writer that weekend at the south end of Hoan Kiem Lake. But Cuong Phong (the name Giang wrote under at that time; not as subtly poetic in meaning, it translated awkwardly as “strong wind”) never made it to the café: a flu inexplicably gripped him the night before and he stayed in his hotel room, sweating with fever. He neglected even to send a message. On his way out of the hotel the next morning, he learned that several bistros near the lake had been bombed the previous evening, and the man whom Cuong Phong was to meet with had been killed.

  The then-Cuong Phong walked out of the hotel and up the street seeing everything with intensified exactness. So that he stared, and the world of hearing left him. The unfamiliar city’s gray streets and rusting metal gates and thin, dull silver-and-black bicycle tires and brown wood sidings and brown faces struck him; even the gray stripe of sky between two houses seemed solid and throbbing. He kept his head down as he walked but felt the heat and the stirred air around each body he passed. He crossed a street and stepped onto an ornate footbridge spanning a portion of the lake. From the north end of the lake, he could see the south end—the row of storefronts, the new cavernous holes in two of them, the surrounding storefronts with their awnings and curved balustrades intact. He turned his eyes toward the water and rested his arms on the rail of the bridge. For several minutes he stared at the dark surface of the water. He did not notice the elderly woman who had stopped beside him, put her hand on the rail, and leaned forward to peer into his face. She was asking if he was ill.

  “No, no,” he said, trying to shake himself out of his fog. “I’m fine. Please let me be.”

  The woman glared at him and said nothing for a moment. Then she declared, “That is what is wrong with you young people these days. You are all trying to do everything on your own. You forget you were born tied to your mothers.”

  He didn’t know how to respond. He frowned, confused.

  “Where has respect gone these days?” continued the woman, her voice rising. “You young people are all ill.”

  He put his head in his hands. “Ba,” he said, using the prop
er address for a young man speaking to an elderly woman, “I am sorry. Forgive me.” He repeated this several times, deeply frustrated, as the old woman continued to regard him with her stoical expression. Finally, though he knew it was the rudest gesture he could make, he turned his back and walked away without excusing himself.

  And years later, the moment still resounded in Giang’s mind. He heard himself repeating those words and felt how they continued to fall short, words so impotent, he told Tran, “and me repeating them again and again with an excruciating yearning.” They were lying together in a borrowed bed in some other colleague’s apartment (arrangements like this were necessary, as Giang was married and they were hesitant to go to Tran’s apartment for fear her neighbors would talk), as he told her his story. “You ask, so I tell you. That is why I write,” he said, “because I’ve not forgotten the feeling of being on the bridge that morning with the old lady. I’ve still found no satisfaction with it. None.”

  Phuong-Li did not care for politics. To her it was a futile way to expend one's energies, and she did not understand the tension it stirred among people, the long heavy silences and sharp looks and charged nonchalance that passed now among her peers who held varying views. Phuong-Li merely wanted to play with old friends as they had when they were children, chasing each other about in the rice fields or laughing at something simple like the nickname Snake she had given one boy because he could not pronounce his words correctly and he spit when he talked fast.

  “Why do you call me that?” the boy asked her once.

  “That is my secret,” Phuong-Li teased him, and her other friends giggled.

  The boy, because he was fond of her, was flattered by her attention, no matter what the reason, so he answered to the name Snake.

  Phuong-Li liked to recall these small, clever childhood games; they gave her a sense of importance, of secret control. Years later she saw the boy she had called Snake. He was now nineteen years old and had been away at school. What kind of school she did not know exactly, for she’d never asked. School was school, that vague process a few children, usually boys, went through. And when they'returned, people bowed with deeper respect to these sons, and mothers blushed with adulation if it was their own sons returning in such style, for to parents, schooling meant potential wealth. To Phuong-Li, it meant very little.

  He came to her family’s house with another neighborhood friend, and when Phuong-Li’s little brothers opened the door, the friend asked for her. Snake hung back, his hands in his pockets, and looked at his feet. When Phuong-Li came to the door, he waited to see if she would recognize him before he spoke. She did, and jumped forward to embrace him. Time and what she considered to be maturity had made her magnanimous toward all past acquaintances, close or not. He raised his face and smiled, showing warmth and something else, a certain light at seeing her again. It was in her eyes as well, though she did not realize it.

  “You’ve grown up to be so pretty,” he exclaimed.

  “And you’ve learned how to speak properly!” she teased him.

  “I’ve learned many things” was his demure response. “Yes, I’ve learned lots of awful and good things.” The stiltedness in his tone almost bothered her, but she dismissed it as some new style of speech; she was too caught up noticing how good he looked after these years away, the way he now held himself, the confident tilt of his head, the lazy sureness in his smile and in his calm, smart eyes.

  Later, he smoked cigarettes with her older brothers while discussing politics and life in the city. She did not listen to their words, did not recognize that they were secretly probing one another with statements meant to provoke responses that would reveal their true allegiances. She did notice a tension in the air, although it only made her lament to herself: Why could they not all get along like old friends, like they used to, instead of indulging in all this tiresome talk? She admired the way Snake spoke, though, his easy mannerisms, the fierceness that lay beneath his composed veneer, showing itself only in small movements — the quick, forceful lift of his chin at a sound in the kitchen, the brusqueness with which he struck his matches. She thought he must be saying important, intelligent things, even if she did not understand them.

  No, she cared nothing for politics. After that day, all she cared about was love.

  In the spring of 1972, Tran was in her seventh week of writing daily installments. She woke early in the morning and brewed herself a cup of coffee in the apartment where she now lived with her six-year-old son. They lived alone, the two of them, because Tran had felt her sisters and religious mother could not understand the life of a writer, especially when it was a woman who sought such a life.

  Tran stood over the small stove in the far corner of the first-floor room, gazing each morning at the wall as she fried an egg for her son, her thoughts drifting to another world, of horses and hoop dresses and colored silks, of idle, well-educated, well-mannered women, servants announcing visitors in doorways of parlors. Tall, handsome, white-skinned men in waistcoats. They bowed and kissed the ladies’ hands. And from this place her thoughts would then drift into the world of Vietnam. But she was unable to conjure any images of a parallel world here, only a vague sense of longing. The world of Vietnam was too visceral and incongruent next to the polished drama of the America in her mind. Even her imagined version of Vietnam—the bustling port town of Haiphong in 1954, the setting of her story—was humid and overcrowded and raw. (It resembled present-day Saigon, the only experience of a city from which she had to draw.) There were no equivalents here to the panoramic views of rolling green hills outside windows of estate houses, as existed in that other land. Even the war here was not so noble and deeply felt a calamity as it seemed to be there. Here the war was bogged down by the clearly unromantic facts of industry and contradicting chains of command, and it often stretched on for months without incident. And when an incident did occur it was always outside the city limits, far enough away to seem almost—though not entirely—irrelevant. As for the views outside Tran’s windows, they were of the stucco walls of neighboring buildings. The inner walls of her own apartment (which she would stare at for hours each morning as she typed) were pale blue and cracked. The only decorative architectural elements were the concrete blocks with rough-edged patterns of ellipses and curved diamonds cut into them, which fitted into the windows as screens. When the sunlight came through, it cast these patterns in shadow on the concrete floor.

  Tran slid the egg she had cooked into a bowl and set it before her son, Thien. While Thien ate, she combed his hair. Sometimes she would tell him a tidbit of what she was working on in her head. “Maybe today is the day Phuong-Li will encounter her old Uncle Minh in the market,” she would say. (Writing a serial novel was as much an adventure as reading one, she had found. She turned in her installments daily or weekly without much revision or forethought, and the pieces were published immediately, taken out of her hands, cemented in ink that quickly. It made plot seem to her a live, unpredictable factor she was stumbling blindly after, trying to keep up with it.)

  Thien would respond appropriately, because he had been following along; all the names of persons his mother spoke of he accepted in the same way, whether they were fictional or real. “Will Uncle Minh punish her for how she ran away last week?”

  “But she knows Uncle Minh’s secret, that he married his wife for her money, because she has met Uncle Minh’s other daughter, remember? The one no one is supposed to know about.”

  “Uncle Minh is a bad man,” Thien might say, and often Tran was proud of his astute judgments.

  After breakfast each morning she walked her son to the end of the alley where it met an avenue. There he joined several other boys, and Tran watched as they raced across the avenue and through the gates to their school. Then she walked—smiling but not speaking to anyone she passed—back to the apartment. And once inside, she would sit down to write.

  II

  They came to her apartment in the middle of the night and woke her.
With Giang were two men, young reporters she had seen around the newspaper office. One waited, smoking, behind the wheel of Giang’s car while the other stood outside her door. Giang waited halfway down the alley, pacing in the predawn light.

  “He says you must come with us. He’s heard a rumor. It’s important we investigate this,” said the man at her door.

  Tran did not hesitate to wake her son and take him over to the woman next door. Tran had been asked before to accompany reporters on their outings—they knew she would be interested in the outings as research, or sometimes they just wanted an extra eye along—but this was the first time Giang (whom she knew by reputation to be one of the more esteemed senior reporters) had singled her out. The woman next door, herself a mother of five and familiar with Tran’s erratic schedule, welcomed Thien.

  Tran fumbled for her camera and notebooks and left with the men.