I went back to Vietnam to work for three years, but I never visited my father’s birthplace some two hundred and fifty kilometres from Saigon. When I was a child, I would vomit the whole way whenever I made that twelve-hour journey, even though my mother put pillows on the floor of the car to keep me still. The roads were riddled with deep fissures. Communist rebels planted mines by night and pro-American soldiers cleared them away by day. Still, sometimes a mine exploded. Then we had to wait hours for the soldiers to fill in the holes and gather up the human remains. One day a woman was torn to pieces, surrounded by yellow squash blossoms, scattered, fragmented. She must have been on her way to the market to sell her vegetables. Maybe they also found the body of her baby by the roadside. Or not. Maybe her husband had died in the jungle. Maybe she was the woman who had lost her lover outside the house of my maternal grandfather, the prefect.
One day when we were deep inside the darkness of a cube van on our way to pick strawberries or beans, my mother told me about a woman, a day labourer, who would wait for her employer across from my maternal grandfather’s place every morning. And every morning my grandfather’s gardener brought her a portion of sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf. Every morning, standing in the truck that was taking her to the rubber trees, she watched the gardener move away in the middle of the bougainvillea garden. One morning she didn’t see him cross the dirt road to bring her breakfast. Then another morning … and another. One night she gave my mother a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else. My mother never saw her again in the truck jam-packed with workers. That young girl never went back to the plantations or to the bougainvillea garden. She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her. No one told her that my grandfather had accepted the request of the gardener’s parents to send him to another town. No one told her that the gardener, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun.
Madame Girard had the same burned skin even though she didn’t work in the strawberry fields or the plantations. Madame Girard had hired my mother to clean her house, not knowing that my mother had never held a broom in her hands before her first day on the job. Madame Girard was a platinum blonde like Marilyn Monroe, with blue, blue eyes, and Monsieur Girard, a tall, brown-haired man, was the proud owner of a sparkling antique car. They often invited us to their white house with its perfectly mown lawn and flowers lining the entrance and a carpet in every room. They were the personification of our American dream.
Their daughter invited me to her roller skating competitions. She passed on to me her dresses that had become too small, one of them a blue cotton sundress with tiny white flowers and two straps that tied on the shoulder. I wore it during the summer, but also in winter over a white turtleneck. During our first winters, we didn’t know that every garment had its season, that we mustn’t simply wear all the clothes we owned. When we were cold, without discriminating, without knowing the different categories, we would put one garment over another, layer by layer, like the homeless.
My father tracked down Monsieur Girard thirty years later. He no longer lived in the same house, his wife had left him and his daughter was on sabbatical, in search of a purpose, a life. When my father brought me this news, I almost felt guilty. I wondered if we hadn’t unintentionally stolen Monsieur Girard’s American dream from having wanted it too badly.
I also got back together with my first friend, Johanne, thirty years later. She didn’t recognize me, neither on the phone nor in person, because she had known me as deaf and mute. We’d never spoken. She didn’t really remember that she’d wanted to become a surgeon, even though I had always told my high school guidance counsellors that I was interested in surgery, like Johanne.
The guidance counsellors would call me into their offices every year because there was a glaring gap between my grades and the results of my IQ tests, which bordered on deficient. How could I not find the intruder in the series “syringe, scalpel, skull, drill” when I could recite by heart a passage about Jacques Cartier? I only mastered what had been specifically taught to me, passed on to me, offered to me. Which is why I understood the word surgeon but not darling or tanning salon or horseback riding. I could sing the national anthem but not “The Chicken Dance” or the birthday song. I accumulated knowledge at random, like my son Henri, who can pronounce poire but not maman, because the course of our learning was atypical, full of detours and snags, with no gradation, no logic. I shaped my dreams in the same way, through meetings, friends, other people.
For many immigrants, the American dream has come true. Some thirty years ago, in Washington, Quebec City, Boston, Rimouski or Toronto, we would pass through whole neighbourhoods strewn with rose gardens, hundred-year-old trees, stone houses, but the address we were looking for never appeared on one of those doors. Nowadays, my aunt Six and her husband, Step-uncle Six, live in one of those houses. They travel first class and have to stick a sign on the back of their seat so the hostesses will stop offering them chocolates and champagne. Thirty years ago, in our Malaysian refugee camp, the same Step-uncle Six crawled more slowly than his eight-month-old daughter because he was suffering from malnutrition. And the same Aunt Six used the one needle she had to sew clothes so she could buy milk for her daughter. Thirty years ago, we lived in the dark with them, with no electricity, no running water, no privacy. Today, we complain that their house is too big and our extended family too small to experience the same intensity of the festivities — which lasted until dawn — when we used to get together at my parents’ place during our first years in North America.
There were twenty-five of us, sometimes thirty, arriving in Montreal from Fanwood, Montpelier, Springfield, Guelph, coming together in a small, three-bedroom apartment for the entire Christmas holiday. Anyone who wanted to sleep alone had to move into the bathtub. Inevitably, conversations, laughter and quarrels went on all night. Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream. We were well acquainted with the dreams of our nearest and dearest: those with whom we were packed in tightly for nights at a time. Back then, we all had the same dreams. For a long time, we were obliged to have the same one, the American dream.
When I turned fifteen, my aunt Six, who at the time was working in a chicken processing plant, gave me a square aluminum tin of tea that had images of Chinese spirits, cherry trees and clouds in red, gold and black. Aunt Six had written on each of ten pieces of paper, folded in two and placed in the tea, the name of a profession, an occupation, a dream that she had for me: journalist, cabinetmaker, diplomat, lawyer, fashion designer, flight attendant, writer, humanitarian worker, director, politician. It was thanks to that gift that I learned there were other professions than medicine, that I was allowed to dream my own dreams.
Once it’s achieved, though, the American dream never leaves us, like a graft or an excrescence. The first time I carried a briefcase, the first time I went to a restaurant school for young adults in Hanoi, wearing heels and a straight skirt, the waiter for my table didn’t understand why I was speaking Vietnamese with him. At first I thought that he couldn’t understand my southern accent. At the end of the meal, though, he explained ingenuously that I was too fat to be Vietnamese.