So my mother had taken on the duties of man of the house, Minister of Education, Mother Superior, chief executive of the clan. She made decisions, handed out punishments, put right delinquents, silenced protesters … My grandfather, as chairman of the board, didn’t look after everyday tasks. My grandmother had her hands full raising her young children and recovering from repeated miscarriages. According to my mother, Uncle Two was the embodiment of selfishness and egocentricity. And so she became established as manager of the supreme authority. I remember one day when my grandmother didn’t even dare ask her to unlock the bathroom door and release her little brother and sisters who were being punished for going out with Uncle Two without my mother’s permission. As she was only a young girl, she administered her authority — naively — with an iron hand. Her revenge against her older brother’s nonchalance and the way the children revered him was poorly planned, because the youngsters went on playing in the bathroom, and did it without her. All the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance.
Over the past ten years, however, my mother has discovered the joys of dancing. She let her friends persuade her that the tango, the cha-cha and the paso doble could replace physical exercise, that there was nothing sensual or seductive or intoxicating about them. Yet ever since she’s been going to her weekly dancing class, she says now and then that she wishes she’d segued from her days on the election campaign to the parties where her brother, my father and dozens of other young candidates amused themselves around a table. Also, today she seeks my father’s hand at a movie and his kiss on her cheek when posing for photos.
My mother started to live, to let herself be carried away, to reinvent herself at the age of fifty-five.
As for my father, he didn’t have to reinvent himself. He is someone who lives in the moment, with no affection for the past. He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements. That’s why he always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness, whether holding a mop on the steps of a hotel or sitting in a limousine en route to a strategic meeting with his minister.
From my father I inherited the permanent feeling of satisfaction. Where did he find it, though? Was it because he was the tenth child? Or because of the long wait for his kidnapped father’s release? Before the French left Vietnam, before the Americans arrived, the Vietnamese countryside was terrorized by different factions of thugs introduced there by the French authorities to divide the country. It was common practice to sell wealthy families a nail to pay the ransom of someone who’d been kidnapped. If the nail wasn’t bought, it was hammered into an earlobe — or elsewhere — on the kidnap victim. My grandfather’s nail was bought by his family. When he came home, he sent his children to urban centres to live with cousins, thereby ensuring their safety and their access to education. Very early, my father learned how to live far away from his parents, to leave places, to love the present tense, to let go of any attachment to the past.
That is why he’s never been curious to know his real date of birth. The official date recorded on his birth certificate at the city hall corresponds to a day with no bombardment, no exploding mines, no hostages taken. Parents may have thought that their children’s existence began on the first day that life went back to normal, not at the moment of their first breath.
Similarly, he has never felt the need to see Vietnam again after his departure. Today, people from his birthplace visit him on behalf of property developers, suggesting he demand the deed to his father’s house. They say that ten families live there now. The last time we saw it, it was being used as a barracks by Communist soldiers recycled as firemen. Those soldiers started their families in the big house. Do they know that they live in a building put up by a French engineer, a graduate of the prestigious National School of Bridges and Roads? Do they know that the house is a thank-you from my great-uncle to my grandfather, his older brother, who sent him to France for his education? Do they know that ten children were brought up there but now live in ten different cities because they were ejected from their family circle? No, they know nothing. They can’t know: they were born after the French withdrawal and before that part of the history of Vietnam could be taught to them. They’d probably never seen an American face up close, without camouflage, until the first tourists came to their town some years ago. They only know that if my father takes back the house and sells it to a developer, they will receive a small fortune, a reward for confining my paternal grandparents to the tiniest room in their own house during the final months of their lives.
Some nights the firefighter-soldiers, drunk and lost, would fire through the curtains to silence my grandfather. But he’d stopped speaking after his stroke, which had happened before I was even born. I never heard his voice.
My paternal grandfather I never saw in any position but horizontal, stretched out on an enormous ebony daybed that stood on carved feet. He was always dressed in immaculately white pyjamas without a crease. My father’s Sister Five, who had turned her back on marriage to look after her parents, kept watch obsessively over my grandfather’s cleanliness. She would not tolerate the slightest spot or any sign of inattention. At mealtimes, a servant would sit behind him to keep his back straight, while my aunt fed him rice, a mouthful at a time. His favourite meal was rice with roast pork. The slices of pork were cut so finely they seemed to be minced. But they weren’t to be chopped, only cut into small pieces two millimetres square. She mixed them with steaming rice served in a blue and white bowl with a silver ring around its rim to prevent chipping. If the bowls were held up to the sun, one could see translucent areas in the embossed parts. Their quality was confirmed by the glimmers that exposed the shades of blue in the patterns. The bowls nestled gently in my aunt’s hands at every meal, every day, for many years. She would hold one, delicate and warm, in her fingers and add a few drops of soy sauce and a small piece of Bretel butter that was imported from France in a red tin with gold lettering. I was also entitled to this rice now and then when we visited.
Today, my father prepares this dish for my sons when he’s given some Bretel butter by friends coming home from France. My brothers make affectionate fun of my father because he uses the most outrageous superlatives to describe the tinned butter. I agree with him, though. I love the scent of that butter because it reminds me of my paternal grandfather, the one who died with the soldier-firemen.
I also like to use those blue bowls with the silver rims to serve ice cream to my sons. They are the only objects that I wanted from my aunt, the one who was driven out of her house after the death of my paternal grandparents. She became a Buddhist, living in a hut behind a plantation of palm trees, stripped of all material goods but a wooden bed without a mattress, a sandalwood fan and her father’s four blue bowls. She hesitated briefly before complying with my request: the bowls symbolized her last attachment to any earthly concerns. She died shortly after my visit to her hut, surrounded by monks from a nearby temple.