Grass Roof, Tin Roof Read online

  Until at last the policemen put the flames out.

  VI

  The newspaper was discontinued in October 1974, and Tran, now out of work, could no longer afford to keep a maid or to live alone. She decided to move back to her mother’s house, where her sisters and cousins could help tend to Thien and Thuy—little more than a year old now. When Tran and her children saw Muoi Bon off at the train station, it was a wrenching good-bye: for hours afterward, Thuy was in a frenzy. When finally she had tired enough to sleep, it was only to wake crying again, wanting the maid who had spent long hours holding her. The little girl would accept no consolation for weeks after the parting. Gradually, though, she forgot as she grew older.

  In the first months after the shutdown of the newspaper, Tran wandered the city with her son and daughter, slightly at sea. She bought fruit and toys at markets; she sat in cafés and wrote quietly—thoughts and half-hearted ideas she would later burn in private for fear that these papers might be found and misinterpreted—while her children played with the café owners’ kids. Occasionally she ran into a former newspaper colleague doing much the same as she, whiling away days in old familiar haunts, and she was always saddened by their mildly stunned demeanor, their guardedness. It was not safe anymore to speak to anyone, and no one dared ask questions.

  Coming home one evening with her children, Tran passed the woman from the adjacent house on her stoop washing her baby in a round plastic tub. The baby sat placidly, its large dark eyes staring up at Tran as she approached, its skin wet and gleaming in the fading light of their small lane. Silently, Tran’s children stared back at the wet baby. The two mothers smiled at each other. Tran felt an odd sense of imperfection and peace at that moment, the first such peace she had felt in many months, years even. This other woman appeared close to her own age and, as far as Tran could tell, did not have a husband, either. Probably, though, hers had died in the war, clearly affiliated with one army or the other, thought Tran, stepping into her mother’s house.

  That night, when Thuy awoke crying, Tran took her out to the stoop to feed her. She had chosen to use the bottle rather than breastfeed because she understood this to be an avenue toward freedom, albeit a small one; it was what most American women chose as well, or she had gathered as much from her few American acquaintances. The lane was dark blue and weighted and still. The woman from next door appeared, leaning her head out the window of her house.

  “Sister, I can’t sleep tonight,” the woman whispered.

  “Your baby?”

  “No, it’s more than that, I’m afraid.” She spoke quickly, as if she’d planned this meeting. “I know who you are, I know you are a smart woman and you know about the world. I am afraid. I am not optimistic. Do you know what I mean?”

  Tran did.

  “I need advice,” said the neighbor. “I have money. I’ve been saving to remodel my house. But I’m afraid. If I spend it, I may not have long to enjoy my new home, but if I don’t spend it, I know the Communists will surely take it from me when they come. Am I not right?”

  Feeling for something inside herself, the appropriate response, the so-designated wisdom, Tran found instead a puncturing, exhaustive pain. She told the woman: “Spend your money. Regret nothing.”

  Later she would not forget: the sounds of construction from the house next door—the pounding of hammers, the rhythms of saws and shovels. She would think she should have recognized it as a sign, an omen of reconstruction soon to come. A new home waiting, a new man—an architect. She should have known that just as the rooms of the neighbor’s house were being gutted and renovated, so would she be. Many old pieces cast aside, painful new fittings and additions. She would remember: her mother on that fatal last day, sitting up from lying on the couch as alarms rang out over the city, her long hair unraveling from its bun (hair that in Tran’s memory would tumble, in a repeated wave, down her back), and the unspoken final wish so obvious right then: that she might be invited to go with her favorite unsaved daughter so that this daughter might still have a chance to be saved. “We’ll come back for you, Mother,” Tran and each of her sisters had said in turn, as they ran off to meet their various exit sponsors at the prearranged rendezvous points.

  Tran and her two children made their exit by plane on April 29, 1975. It was not the narrow escape it might have been a day later, but it still gave Tran a sense of having forgotten something in haste. Tran had packed, telling herself she would soon return, and she left valuables behind to convince herself. Framed photographs of her parents and grandparents, favorite shirts, her old diaries, Thien’s baby memorabilia. But the truth was that there was a limit to what passengers were permitted to bring aboard the plane; she had had to be selective. One change of clothing, a handful of old photographs, several books she knew she had to save, some mementos from the newspaper. In those few final days the streets of Saigon were full, chaotic, streaming. People flung themselves on cars, made leaps at trucks and buses that looked like they were headed somewhere, somewhere else. People squeezed against one another at the gates of the U.S. and French embassies, the airports, the radio stations—any facility known to have a connection with the outer world.

  For it was plain by this time that Vietnam was a sinking ship, a shriveling dragon. All the worlds turmoil seemed concentrated here, with cameras and people running together: here was Vietnam offering herself up, desperate, scandalized. Tran watched the shape and details of the land below becoming simpler—more intrinsic to the landscape as a whole—out the plane window as they ascended. Here was the land, here was the water, here was the gradation of browns in the soil as it proceeded toward the water. Here was the city and here was the countryside, in definitive different textures. Here was the ocean. She could not make out the tall spires of the Notre Dame Cathedral, where a few hours ago she had seen a woman shot by a soldier; she could not see the rivers of people thronging the avenues as she’d suspected she might. Though she could see the wide, winding, mud-brown waters of the Mekong making its way to the sea like a flat serpent. As if eager to dissolve itself in the sea, the river was prematurely dispersing into tributaries that were like multitudinous, fine tentacles.

  And the plane, Tran wondered, what was it made of? For though she had seen plenty of them, this was the first she had ever entered. She looked around her at the stiff, narrow seats, the other people silent and crowded there and on the floors, some crying, others clinging to some object or other, or clutching each other. Broad-shouldered Americans stood by the exits with guns. Some uniformed, some not, with sweat rings staining the armpits of their short-sleeved white shirts. The interior of the plane was like the cavernous insides of some great metal monster. They had put their fates into the hands of, well, fate perhaps, is what she felt. Neither of her children was crying anymore, only staring around. She put her arms around them both and held tightly. In the end, she thought, your children are the only crucial possessions you can take with you or leave behind.

  VII

  In the new country, she will remarry a Westerner. (She will have turned thirty; her debt to prophecy, she hopes, will have been paid.) He will be an immigrant himself, though from Denmark, and though already in the new country for twenty-odd years, sympathetic to her circumstances, but also forward-looking and a believer in reinvention. She will be enamored of him for his authority and confidence—his compassion!—and he will teach them many new things. For instance, he will insist the children speak correct English. Labrador. Siamese. Department store. One dollar, two dollars. One fish, two fish, he will tell them. With, not wiff. And it will be his idea to buy a piece of land in those once fabled hills of gold, where they will build a house with a good view of the valley and raise the children with dogs and ponies and chickens. Here, Tran will see more trees and taller trees and stranger formations of land and grass than she’d ever imagined, and here—for the first time in the five years since their arrival in America—she will feel calm and resign herself to being there. She will learn how to dr
ive a car. She will drive the children to track practice, the bus stop, the park, the library, the grocery store, the pizza parlor. Once, stupidly, she will try to return a can of Folger’s coffee to the wrong supermarket, not understanding the incriminating details of receipts. The car, she will discover, is a wonderful place for dreaming. Her head will fill with stories, words, speculation, slights. But the need to write will have begun to ebb; she will not commit any of these ideas to paper. She will receive news of her mother’s death, months after it has occurred, one afternoon while she is eating a sandwich (and she will try to picture the story in her mind: her mother went to market in the morning, came home, had some soup, complained of being tired, lay down, never woke). On weekends she will do the laundry while her husband changes the oil in the Volkswagen or the truck, mends a fence, brushes the dogs. The old organizations, her old friends and colleagues, will begin to seem inadequate to her. Slowly she will lose touch, the immediacy of old causes now faded, juvenile, surreal—her husband, who works as an architectural adviser for the government, has taught her this: there is little that ordinary people can do in the complex web of a large modern society.

  On occasion, though, she will try to explain herself to him. She will talk about Buddhism, the closest thing she has to a religion. Her husband will tell her he is an atheist. (With passion: “I answer to no one, you hear, no one.”) She will try to tell him Buddhism is more a way of life than a religion. She will try to explain the concept of the low road, of seeking not to worship but to kill your God, and of “acceptance,” of how the highest happiness in life must often come through suffering.

  “The highest happiness is saffron,” she will say.

  He will frown at her. “Saffron is a spice. It comes from a flower. Very painstaking to extract.” She will shake her head and say it again. But still he will not understand the last word so they must struggle over it: zephyr? sever? (“Are you dwelling on the past again?”) sub-fur? Finally they will go for the dictionary. She will search and search for the correct spelling. And he will laugh.

  “Suffering! To suffer! S-u-f, you mean!” For she has spelled the word saffering. “There is a big difference between an ‘a’ and a ‘u,’ Tran. Those are two entirely different vowels.” He will demonstrate these sounds for her, shaping his mouth with exaggeration. “A, e, i, o, u,” he will recite for her.

  2. LUCKY

  Our dogs were two large mixed-breed Newfoundlands. One black female that our father had rescued—pregnant already—from the pound, and her son, a dirty white pup with faint brown spots, the only pup we kept from the litter. The largest—thick-furred with shorter ears and tail than his mother. Quiet but strong. We called him “Kee,” the most easily pronounceable name my sister, Beth, and I could agree on at the time. She was five, I was eight. No one knew who Kee’s father was. All we knew, our own father liked to say, was he must’ve been some kind of dog to jump over the six-foot fence at the pound to get to Jamie, the mother dog. (Beth and I didn’t understand what the “to get to” part really entailed, though our father’s approving chuckle as he said it comforted us.) Perhaps Kee’s father had been a wolf, our father would hypothesize when Kee howled at the moon or disappeared for days into the woods below our property. We were duly impressed. We took these signs to be evidence of Kee’s exceptionality, his uncontainability, his superiority—the commendable result of an enigmatic and wayward background.

  Kee had been bom just before our family moved to the Sierra foothills; thus he was the same age as the house that our father was in the slow process of building. Because of his job and lack of money and having only our older brother, Thien, and a neighbor to help, only the skeleton of a first floor was standing after an entire year. Now it was October and the rain had come. Shallow puddles formed where the concrete foundation was not even. The rain seeped under tarps and warped some of the lumber. Our father worried hugely over small and large complications alike. The loss of a few pieces of lumber, spider web-size cracks in the foundation, the possibility of landslides or floods over the site. Waiting for spring, he busied himself with other projects on the property, such as stringing barbed wire for the future horse pastures and burning brush and repairing leaks in the storage shed roof. He kept Thien busy as well. Our father was like a thundercloud, swelled with many hopes and plans for our new life here, glowering and desperate to set them loose, to drum them into our heads before—as he seemed to think—it became too late.

  It was 1981.

  Kee was a beautiful and smart and gentle dog. Our father would point out the integrity in his eyes, his deep-set lupine brown eyes like all the heavy-climate breeds seemed to have—the clear, soulful gaze of a creature who has not only the capacity to live wild but also enough humility and dignity to prevent him from ever harming a thing. (Our father believed this. I think it had to do with his own experience of war, of what he knew he might’ve been capable of had certain situations arisen—which they had not—in Korea in the 1950s.) Dogs like these, he would tell us, were unknowingly burdened by their own strength, for nothing in their domesticated lives would ever truly put it to the test. Yet that combined strength and reserve was a fine, fine characteristic, he would say, with a kind of trapped passion, and even when I was only eight it struck me he was not speaking just of dogs. He was speaking rather of something vital and exacting that had compelled him to hold himself aloof, always—from a more messily, shamelessly, and duplicitously emoting larger population, as his descriptions made the rest of the world out to be.

  I understood the elusive characteristic he spoke of was what had driven him forward—and outward—through his own life. He had fled his family and another country years ago, in the early 1950s, by joining first the Danish marines and then the U.S. Army. “You have no idea, no idea what I’ve been through,” he would tell us. And he wished now to nurture this characteristic in us children—now that we were his—this kernel of something like goodness or kindness or acumen, it is hard to name in just one word. But I would try to recognize it for myself in some sights or moments I believed my father might commend my noticing—an unusually shaped pine tree on a hillside (it must be something unique perhaps), or the warmth I felt as I began to fall asleep, before I had fallen too far no longer to be aware of the pull of sleep (it must be something inscrutable and intensely personal, then).

  But to continue about our animals: we kept dogs and cats because we adored them, we kept chickens for eggs and slaughter. Our father considered chickens to be mainly brainless creatures, and no matter what the extent of their unique talents or strengths or markings, they could never become refined. This was the important difference between chickens and dogs and applied even to our favorite hen, whom we called “Lucky” because occasionally she laid an egg with two yolks. Still, we had to keep in mind she was brainless, ill destined. Our father was the kind of man who held to a hierarchy of nature, who placed his faith only in the indifference of evolution.

  One morning, he woke early and walked down the hill to the chicken coop. He had to search for the hens' eggs, which often they tried to hide in comers of the coop or in holes scratched in the dirt underneath. Lucky had found a spot in the crook of the roots of an oak tree some way away, and from under her he pulled out (later, this is how we would always recall this) the largest egg any of our chickens ever laid and Lucky’s last complete one.

  Our mother was sitting on the trailer steps, smoking her cigarette, looking at the morning view of the mountains. She was smallboned and youthful-looking but possessed a manliness—her flat chest and short hair, her petite, muscular legs, her forward, bright manner that could come as a surprise from someone of her stature. She had (in those years) a lack of self-consciousness that we as children were not aware was unusual for an adult. She was also a willing companion to our father’s adventures: the house-building, the purchase of our trailer, our new lifestyle in the foreign countryside. She was unafraid to pick up a shovel, she proudly sported the cowboy boots he’d suggested she bu
y for the terrain up here.

  “On mornings like this, I think we very lucky,” she said happily. Her English was still heavily accented.

  “Yes,” agreed our father as he came up the driveway, toting eggs in the stretched-out hem of his T-shirt. “Look at this.” Proudly, he showed our mother that morning’s largest egg, brown-speckled and big as one of her fists.

  He carried the eggs into the trailer, where he placed the large one on the counter for us children to find when we woke. The rest he placed in the fridge. My sister and I were sleeping tangled like kittens in the sheets of the fold-out bed in the trailer’s small dining area, our brother in the loft above us, one skinny arm dangling loose and naked over the side into the crisp morning air. Trailer life for us was like an extended camping trip, after our first few years in the States in apartment complexes and working- to middle-class suburban neighborhoods; we knew it was impermanent, this new, less structured life, and so had set ourselves loose into it, without complaint, with casual abandon, with an eye to discovery. Each routine activity seemed new and alive to us. For instance, we took our baths outside now with the use of a cup and a plastic yellow baby tub, or on a stump. We went to the bathroom outside as well, at the base of the nearest large old oak tree with a roll of toilet paper that we carried back and forth from the trailer (some mornings we made a game of passing the toilet paper off to one another as we rushed out to pee). Mastering the mundane in these new ways dominated much of our attention, and we congratulated ourselves on it every day, our survival of the daily—the mishaps and ingenuities and tiny ridiculous triumphs we’d managed. Or our parents did, at least, while our brother sulked in dismay at having to live like this at all, and my sister and I thought nothing of it, really, for we were too young to know any better. When our father and brother came home from surplus sales and unloaded bathroom appliances in the dirt in front of the skeleton of our house, we climbed into the dry tubs and pretended they were boats. We lounged on the toilet seats and ate lunch. We played outside all day and slept solidly through the night.